


Color In Your Hands

by AnonymousCatastrophe405



Series: Colors [1]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Art School, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, BPD!Adam or bust, F/M, Family Drama, First Time Blow Jobs, Gen, Implied Sexual Content, Internal Conflict, Loss of Parent(s), M/M, Mental Health Issues, Multi, Mutual Pining, OT5 Friendship, Oral Sex, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Past Abuse, Past Drug Addiction, Past Relationship(s), Polyamory, Prolonged Arguments, Tennis, Trans Character, ronan's hand kink, twenty-something au
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-05-29
Updated: 2018-02-07
Packaged: 2018-04-01 20:13:02
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 25
Words: 87,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4033021
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AnonymousCatastrophe405/pseuds/AnonymousCatastrophe405
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Art isn't just paint and music.  Art is breaking glass and the sounds we make without realizing.  Art is whatever gets you laid." -- <i>A Softer World 830, Emily Horne and Joey Comeau</i></p><p>Originally written to fill a prompt on Tumblr, now on to living a life of it's own no one ever anticipated.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. The One Where Adam Almost Drinks Paint Water

Every time Adam hauls himself to the fifth-floor painting studios he wonders why he doesn’t do this more often, and once he’s there he remembers that he’s not a painting or fine arts major and that anything he does here is ultimately fruitless, wasted time better spent elsewhere. 

His coveralls, ever-present and well-worn, make him stand out here where he blends in downstairs in the welding suites and the foundry in them. Up here, where these students are largely studying fine arts together, their camaraderie over cadmium is a physical presence in the air, a living thing born of the Renaissance masters and Impressionist visionaries and post-modern trailblazers, Adam is an interloper no one wants to approach.

This is an open studio for anyone to use. He has much a right to be here as any of these fine arts students. He wishes they’d stop glancing at him like an intruder as he moves to the far side of the room, to the wide working counters along the tall, open windows. Adam tosses his bag up onto the counter and digs out the cloth roll of his brushes and the small portable palette of cheap acryllics, the canvasboard he picked up the other day at the craft store and the half-drunk bottle of stale water from his car. His entire painting kit cost less than twenty dollars. Most of the students in here have spent that much on a single paintbrush. 

Blue says she understands how he feels, but she’s kind-of-but-not-really-well-sorta dating Gansey, who Adam is certain has never once even touched anything that cost less than twenty dollars. Whatever understanding she may have offered has been tempered by long exposure to Gansey’s cluelessness. 

Adam retrieves one of the tabletop easels from another part of the studio and returns to his corner to settle himself on the counter, his deaf side to the windows and his back against the ugly cinderblock wall. His position leaves only two sides of him open to approach, which is preferable when he’s in the mood he’s in today, even though that only leaves two routes of escape if he starts to feel claustrophobic. Out the window is a third option he doesn’t actively acknowledge as a genuine one, but the idea of tucking and rolling or jumping out the window secretly delights him. Cartoon physics. 

Ronan Lynch is in the studio today. Adam won’t admit, to anyone, including himself, that this is a reason why he’s in this particular studio and not one of the seven others that are generally less crowded and less frequented by Joseph Kavinsky and his mob of friends. Adam and Ronan aren’t strangers by any stretch of the imagination and spend no small amount of time together outside of class, usually with Gansey and Noah, increasingly with Blue all over again. They’re friends. Good friends, if either of them are feeling charitable that day. But Ronan is private about his paintings and refuses to discuss his concentration portfolio or his fine arts thesis, and notoriously disinterested in explaining the work he does let other people see. Adam has never once been privy to more than the little sketchbook Ronan carries around, so the five feet-square canvas Ronan has had on his easel for the last two months is endlessly fascinating to him. He’s not sure if he wants to see what Ronan is working on or if he’s fine with only ever getting to watch him work. 

Each of his friends had chosen mediums with finesse and long histories and respectability. Adam chose welding because it was useful outside of art school and he’d already known how to use a blowtorch, and because he’s fairly useless with a piece of charcoal or a paintbrush. A professor told him once he was too analytic, too mathematical, for a softer medium than metalwork or sculpting. “Maybe graphic design,” they’d also suggested, not knowing Adam’s computer can barely navigate social media let alone run Photoshop or Illustrator. 

It doesn’t matter that he’s analytic or mathematical do throw bargain paint at a glorified piece of cardboard for the sole excuse of watching Ronan work from across the room, though. It’s worth it just for the chance that he might look up and see Adam. Adam secretly lives for catching Ronan staring at him and pretending he doesn’t notice. 

“You have it so bad,” Noah says, materializing at Adam’s side. He takes the water bottle from Adam’s hand and shakes it at him meaningfully, sloshing the cloudy brown-gray water inside. “Do you want him to see you choke on your paint water? I don’t think he knows CPR.”

Adam hadn’t realized he’d been about to drink from that bottle. Ronan hadn’t been looking. “Do _you_ know CPR?”

“I’m dead, not stupid.” It isn’t an answer, and Noah isn’t really dead–Noah had an existential crisis during his undergrad studies and decided to go from being a wealthy philosophy major with an off-campus townhouse and a gorgeous red Mustang to a broke abstract concept living in the closet-sized third bedroom Gansey and Ronan’s apartment who walked everywhere and constantly bummed rides off people. Sometimes he refers to it as a nervous breakdown. It’s hard to get the straight answer from Noah about the whole thing, if he’d ever been able to give a straight answer about it in the seven years since he abandoned his Camus thesis.

Adam takes his water bottle back and sets it on the windowsill beside him. “Is it that obvious?”

“That you and Ronan are playing the most passive-aggressive game of gay chicken in human history for the last two years? Very. To anyone with eyes.” 

Adam frowns. “Is it that bad?”

“Gansey said something about it.”

“Oh.” Then it is obvious. Gansey is notoriously blind to when the people around him are having feelings more complicated than ‘hungry’ or ‘tired’ or ‘please stop talking about Glendower.’ Noah might be fairly useless, mostly by choice, in most things, but he’s unfailingly good at keeping secrets. If he’s making mention of Gansey commenting on how Adam and Ronan have been dancing around the whatever it is between them, he has a very good reason to.

Ronan is looking at them again the next time Adam looks up, his face unreadable but decidedly interested in an open way that isn’t characteristic of him. Noah waves at him and gets no response, and Ronan goes back to painting. He keeps glancing up in ways that aren’t half as subtle as he clearly wants them to be.

“He wants to ask you out so bad,” Noah is saying. “But at the same time he wants you to ask first.”

“What’s the point? It’s not like he doesn’t spend the night at my place all the time. He has a toothbrush in my bathroom and a drawer in my dresser. He sleeps in my bed with me when he stays over.”

Noah groans. “You guys are _so gay_ already the u.s.t. isn’t even satisfying anymore.”

Adam pretends he knows what u.s.t. means and files it away to ask Blue about later. He catches Ronan looking at him again. This time Ronan doesn’t look away. This time, neither does Adam.


	2. The One With Pleading the Fifth

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Ronan and Adam sitting in a tree,” Gansey singsongs. Adam sputters and chokes on his coffee. Blue wails helplessly and lays her head down on her arms, her shoulders shaking as she starts to snort. People turn to look at them. 
> 
> Ronan’s voice is poisonous. “Noah, what the fuck?”
> 
> Noah is the picture of perfect innocence, smiling serenely over the top of his tea and settling back against the couch with his knees to his chin. “I plead the fifth.”

There are times when Adam is struck by how accurate ‘90s sitcoms were in depicting twenty-somethings as semi-permanent residents in cafes, that an entire age group was endlessly suffering from a chronic caffeine habit and a need for cheap pastries in places with good music and comfy couches and local artwork on the walls. Nino’s is their favorite, their home away from home away from home, a former divey pizza place re-imagined as a near 24 hour mini-diner with a weekly rotating menu and an impressive selection of beverages caffeinated and alcoholic alike.

“You’re very boring,” Blue tells him, nudging his chipped novelty mug of black coffee with a pen. Her chin is resting on the sketchbook she has open in front of her on the coffee table, and she looks like nothing more than a disembodied arm, shoulder, and head hovering between it and Gansey’s right leg.

“Old,” Ronan says, dropping his leather bracelets from between his teeth. The movement flashes the raised pale pink scars on the inside of his wrist. “Old men drink black coffee, Parrish.”

Adam frowns and picks his mug up, moving it away from Blue’s weapon. “I’m old at heart. Can you even imagine me drinking a frappucino?”

“Don’t slander my beverage choice,” Gansey says defensively. If Adam is old at heart, Gansey is ancient at his, but he never seems to order anything but the most expensive and frivolous coffee drinks that are, in Adam’s opinion, more akin to desserts than beverages. His clear glass mug is comically tall and topped with whipped cream on the end table beside him. “None of you complain about it when you’re all asking for extra straws because none of you order your own.”

Blue absently puts her hand on his knee and gives it a pat. “That’s because we’re all too cool to order frappuccinos, J. Crew.” Her cappuccino has design in the foam that Adam is pretty sure is a vulva. Noah cackled delightedly when it was placed in front of Blue and demanded someone take a picture of it for him, because his hands were too restless to take a clear one. 

Gansey frowns at the nickname and plucks at his stridently yellow polo shirt. “This isn’t J. Crew. Your game is slipping, Jane.”

“All your preppy shirts looks the same anyway, Dick,” she says, waving her hand at him and the small alligator monogrammed on his chest, dismissive. He used to bristle whenever anyone called him Dick, Adam notes, but when Blue does it it’s tolerable. Gansey is incapable of being annoyed by anything Blue does, however annoying she can sometimes be, so he’s probably more delighted that she decided to match his nickname for her with one of her own. Dick and Jane. 

It’s nauseating. 

Adam isn’t still sore over Blue breaking up with him, but the way she and Gansey seem to be insisting on being unsubtly subtle about their whatever-it-is relationship doesn’t agree with him. The first and only time he griped about it to anyone, Noah’s response had been a very stern (for Noah) look and an admonishment to, as a pot, not go around calling kettles black. Adam resolved to not make any further complaints about it to anyone else in the future.

Adam, under the duress of peer pressure, adds some sugar to his coffee to seem like less of an old man. “You make me feel so lame for liking simple things.”

“You like simple things because you were poor,” Ronan says. “You’re less poor now, Parrish, live a little. Buy a fucking latte once in a while.”

Noah fishes an ice cube out of his tea with a spoon. “Different kind of poverty. Less shameful, more expected.” He pitches his voice lower, imitating a man older than himself. “‘Oh, aren’t all you college-age millennials poor and unemployed? Why don’t you hit the pavement and go job hunting like we used to? Get a job, hippie!’” He rolls his wrist emphatically, “And so on and so forth.” Sometimes Noah’s quarter-life crisis makes him seem very, very old, but not the way Adam is old or the way Gansey is ancient. He covers his mouth with his hand as he sucks on the ice cube, and just like that Noah seems younger than them. “Lattes suck anyway. Too milky.”

Adam’s coffee tastes wrong now, but he’ll be damned if he doesn’t drink it after spending two dollars on it. Across the table, in an armchair he dragged over to sit across from Blue and Gansey, and sort of slightly beside Adam, Ronan flags down a waitress to order a beer, his ID already in hand.

“Little early to be drinking, isn’t it?” Blue asks. Ronan shrugs. 

“Not if you haven’t slept,” he says. “It helps my process.”

“Of getting to sleep?”

“Of painting. Jesus Christ, maggot, sleep is for the weak.”

Gansey taps the skin under his eyes. “You look like you were in a brawl.”

“Maybe I was,” Ronan says. It’s been a while, Adam figures Ronan is due to get himself into trouble sometime soon. The thin skin under Ronan’s eyes is very dark. Adam knows he always looks exhausted, too, but he at least manages to catch a handful of hours every night, crashing and burning hard and fast the minute he hits his pillow. Ronan just never seems to stop going, except for when he cat-naps in the middle of the day or gets a restless hour or two at night when he’s sleeping next to Adam on Adam’s pull-out couch. Last night, he stayed home with Gansey and Noah and helped Gansey with an art history project on Ancient Roman architecture. From what Adam has heard, Noah was entirely unhelpful and laid on the couch watching them construct the model while reciting Dante’s Inferno in Italian. 

“With his pillow, maybe,” Noah says. Ronan shoots him a sharp if-looks-could-kill look, and Noah smiles at him. “While you were tossing and turning all night. Obviously. What else could I possibly mean?” He waggles his eyebrows at Adam across the coffee table, hint hint. 

When the waitress comes back and places Ronan’s beer in front of him, Blue tuts. “Day drinking in public is a new low for you. What would your mother say? What would Matthew say?”

“Mom would tell me I remind her of Dad.” Ronan brings the glass to his mouth and smiles. “And Matthew would ask for a sip.”

“You’d give it to him, too.” Gansey, in an uncharacteristically ill-mannered way, speaks around his straw. “Enabler.”

“They’re Irish, it’s a cultural thing,” Adam says. “Were you weaned on whiskey, Lynch, or did you have to work your way up to that?”

He scoffs. “Please. Who do you think I am?”

“An alcoholic,” Blue mutters. Gansey half nods and half shrugs in agreement, Noah snickers and nearly chokes on another ice cube, and Adam presses his lips together. It’s not a funny thing, and there are times when he does seriously worry about Ronan’s drinking habits, but he also knows that Ronan has cut back considerably over the last two semesters, ever since--Adam doesn’t like to think about the “since” part, mostly because it involves Joseph Kavinsky, whom he knows is Ronan’s friend, but he also knows is a chronically bad influence, that he also also knows has been making deceptively complicated seemingly innocuous overtures for Ronan’s attention for as long as they’ve known him. 

Adam hates him. He’s not entirely sure why. Rather, it’s easier to pretend he doesn’t know why and hope that eventually it’ll become true if his sense of reality ever slips that far. So far it hasn’t come close, and Adam’s not convinced he isn’t bitter about that. He refuses to believe, let alone admit, that he’s jealous of Kavinsky in any way, shape, or form, even if it is due in no small part to Ronan Lynch.

Adam takes another sip of his coffee and realizes everyone’s looking at him expectantly. That could mean one of two things: that he’d accidentally verbalized his thoughts, or that he missed part of the conversation and they’re waiting for his response. Blue catches his eye and reaches up to tuck her hair behind her ear, her left ear, and he realizes that he hadn’t heard something.

“Sorry, what?” he asks, mirroring Blue’s gesture self-consciously. Ronan’s brow furrows slightly.

“I asked how your sculpture is coming along,” Gansey says. As a medieval history and art history dual major, all of their more applied artistic interests are endlessly fascinating to him, but he is the only one who, based on statistics for their majors, is more likely to get a job and make a living in his fields of study than they are.. He isn’t an untalented photographer and some of his sketches are actually quite good, but his passion for them is as a hobbyist, because his passion is, inexplicably, for a very specific period of medieval Welsh history. “Professor Marten said you submitted a proposal for getting it installed on campus?”

“Oh, yeah. Once I start assembling it it’ll be kind of huge, so I figured I could finish it outside over spring break.” No one asks why he isn’t going home, and the fact that Adam still thinks of his parents’ trailer as home even five years after leaving it and cutting ties to them makes his stomach twist uncomfortably. 

It’s nauseating. It may also be his coffee no longer agreeing with him after being altered.

Gansey’s eyes go wide behind his glasses at the thought of a project of such scale. “Is there any way to get it put together before break? My parents were asking after you, and you know you’re always welcome.”

“He means Helen was asking after you,” Blue interrupts. No one else is as amused by Gansey’s older sister’s fondness for him than Blue is. Helen Gansey’s literal perfection having any interest in Adam Parrish’s literal imperfection does occasionally feel like a cosmic joke, but it’s a pleasant one that he can go along with because there’s no punchline. That it makes Blue smile, even though she’s laughing at him when she does it, is worth it. In his pilfered chair, Ronan’s brow furrows again, more deeply this time. Noah clears his throat in a very pointed way and jerks his head in Ronan’s direction, and when Adam doesn’t acknowledge it Noah does it again, with a wide-eyed meaningful look that makes everyone look between him and Adam.

“I’ll need the time off to work on it,” Adam says stiffly. He glares at Noah. “I’ll have to pass, Gansey. Thanks, though.”

Gansey frowns and sulkily sips at his frappucino. Blue puts her hand on the couch and turns to take the glass from his hands to swipe some of the whipped cream from the glass’s rim away with her finger before returning it to him. 

“What about you, Ronan? Plans for break?”

He shrugs. “Not a one.”

“What about Easter?” Gansey asks, as if the very thought of Ronan Lynch, not-so-nice Irish boy, missing an Easter at St. Agnes’s with his brothers would make even the Pope take notice of his absence. “You are going home for Easter, right?”

“I’m going for that, but I’m staying here for break,” Ronan explains. “Too much shit to do I can’t take with me.”

“Finishing your painting?” Adam asks. He will never stop burning with the desire to know what’s on that canvas. “I mean, it’s got to be close to done by now, right?”

Ronan makes a noncommittal sound as he sips his beer. “If I manage to evolve above the need for sleep I will.”

“If you’re both going to be working, will you even end up seeing each other while we’re all away?” Blue asks. She asks because she, like Noah, has a vested interest in seeing Adam and Ronan finally resolve their u.s.t.--which she’d been very kind to explain after she stopped rolling her eyes at Adam when he asked--but her approach is a bit more subtle and partially fueled by a desire to see Adam move on before she finally gets around to jumping Gansey. “Remember how all work and no play makes you a dull boy, Adam.”

“He’s dull anyway,” Ronan says. Adam frowns at him. 

Adam raises his eyebrows at him. “You didn’t think so when you were on that moving dolly.”

“I plead the fifth.”

“I’m not accusing you of anything, you can’t do that.”

“I still plead the fifth.”

“Just kiss,” Noah hisses at them. Blue leans against Gansey’s thigh and covers her face to stifle her laughter, and Gansey is pressing his knuckles to his lips to hide his smile, a comforting hand settling on Blue’s head as she starts to hiccup. Ronan and Adam look away from each other to glare at Noah, who doesn’t even seem a little bit fazed by what’s going on around him because he’s gone back to fishing more ice out of his tea. He looks, if anything, thoroughly pleased with himself. Ronan’s face is a pale, slightly uneven pink under his scowl and he seems to be very pointedly not looking anywhere but at Noah or Adam. Adam clears his throat and takes a long sip of his coffee, using the mug to hide his own flush. 

“Ronan and Adam sitting in a tree,” Gansey singsongs. Adam sputters and chokes on his coffee. Blue wails helplessly and lays her head down on her arms, her shoulders shaking as she starts to snort. People turn to look at them. 

Ronan’s voice is poisonous. “Noah, what the fuck?”

Noah is the picture of perfect innocence, smiling serenely over the top of his tea and settling back against the couch with his knees to his chin. “I plead the fifth.”


	3. The One Where Ronan Lies At the End

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan doesn’t want to address the Adam situation, because Ronan wants to wait until Adam addresses the Adam situation himself. Ronan may be holding a torch for him, and may have been holding that torch for much longer than he is willing to admit out loud, but he is content to leave the ball firmly in Adam’s court, because Adam is the one that, to everyone’s knowledge, has never acted on his attraction to other guys despite admitting to said attraction. Ronan, not knowing how strong those attractions are or how interested Adam is in acting upon them, or even without any idea what Adam’s type of guy is, is perfectly content for things to remain exactly as they are indefinitely.

“You’re becoming a menace.”

“Excuse me? _Becoming_ a menace? How rude, Ronan, I have always been a menace. I lived as I died and after-live, which is as a menace.”

Noah is trying to see around the edge of his canvas. He has a handful of what might be green Skittles or wasabi peas or maybe just frozen peas, and he picks them up one at a time. He’s wearing glasses Ronan is at least ninety percent sure he doesn’t need, and they are furiously neon green and kind of glittery and sort of cats-eye shaped, like obnoxious old lady glasses. The color of them and the snack in Noah’s hand match some of the paints Ronan has been fussing with for the last week, and it irks him that he can’t find the right inspiration to get the green he wants. It’s starting to seem like it would be impossible if he couldn’t figure out a way to dream up a gallon of the color he needed.

Noah offers him one of his snacks. They are, apparently, green Sour Patch Kids. Where he managed to procure only the green ones is something Ronan doesn’t really care to consider in any amount of detail, but he knows it’s probably something wasteful that would piss off Blue and Adam. Ronan shakes his head and Noah shrugs.

“Your loss,” Noah says. He pops another of the candies into his mouth. His fake glasses catch the light coming from outside and the lenses flash opaque white for a second. “Do you ever miss having hair?”

Ronan glares at him. “I’m not fucking bald, Noah, I have a full head of hair.”

“You know what I mean.”

Ronan grunts in response. 

“You,” Noah says, pointing at Ronan in a way that is different than how Gansey sometimes points at people, “Are a Neanderthal. A bald one. That buzzcut doesn’t leave enough behind to say you still have hair at all.”

Noah wanders away to poke around the studio. He pauses to examine a sketchbook someone left behind on one of the tables and flips through it. “Oh! Oh my, porn has changed since I was a kid. Tentacles? Ugh!” He flips the book shut gain in disgust and wipes his hand on his scarf, as if cleaning it off from the filth on the page, and continues poking into every little thing that catches his attention. Ronan knows Noah is a snoop, but somehow actually witnessing him gather information is distasteful. Noah turns to look at him and pushes the glasses up like a headband, his hair sticking out every which-way like a pastel-tipped halo. “I have gray hairs, man. I’m getting so old, it’s repulsive. Blue pointed them out to me.” 

Ronan suspects she may not have found these gray hairs on Noah’s platinum blond head. “It had to start happening sometime. You’re pretty old.”

Noah makes an indignant, offended sound and appears quite suddenly around the edge of the canvas to glare at him. “Twenty. Eight. Is. Not. Old.”

Ronan glares back at him. “Your girlfriend and her other boyfriend and all your friends are, like, twenty-one and undergrad. You are a doctoral candidate TA whose birthday just passed. You’re old.”

“And you’re hopeless,” Noah fires back. He comes around the easel to stand next to Ronan, the supply of green candies in his hand significantly diminished. Noah is the only person that’s seen any of his work, and it wasn’t intentional. For a reason he cannot begin to fathom, Ronan has a soft spot for Noah, even though Noah is unfailingly weird and a complete burnout and possibly a little unhinged. Noah, in his way, also has a soft spot for Ronan, even though Ronan is unfailingly weird and a complete asshole and possibly slightly unhinged. They spend a lot of time together, and if Noah wasn’t absolutely and completely devoted to Blue, Ronan would feel badly about how often they used to make out, if only because they were sending out some seriously mixed signals.

“For the love of Christ--”

“Don’t blaspheme around me.”

“I’m not Catholic, I can blaspheme all I want. For the love of _Christ_ ,” Noah repeats, emphatically, while not breaking eye contact with Ronan to drive his point home. “Please just do something about the Adam situation, because it’s like you’re both trying to drive me into the grave all over again with all your pining and your sleepovers. Like, please get yourself laid, get him laid, lay each other, or something. Like seriously.”

Ronan doesn’t want to address the Adam situation, because Ronan wants to wait until Adam addresses the Adam situation himself. Ronan may be holding a torch for him, and may have been holding that torch for much longer than he is willing to admit out loud, but he is content to leave the ball firmly in Adam’s court, because Adam is the one that, to everyone’s knowledge, has never acted on his attraction to other guys despite admitting to said attraction. Ronan, not knowing how strong those attractions are or how interested Adam is in acting upon them, or even without any idea what Adam’s type of guy is, is perfectly content for things to remain exactly as they are indefinitely. Even if it means Ronan’s masturbatory habits are verging on obsessive at this point.

“It hasn’t been that long.” Ronan remembers, in acute detail, the last time he got laid. It was three weeks ago, which is, admittedly, a fairly long time for him, but Kavinsky has a way of pissing him off and just being entirely too much to handle sometimes and needs to be avoided at all costs from time to time, so Ronan has had to find ways to make due. Making due, as it turns out, is mostly having explicit sexual thoughts about a very good friend of his on a regular basis. Noah is frowning at him, so he repeats, “It hasn’t been that long.”

“How is Kavinsky?” Noah somehow knows everything and it is occasionally terrifying. 

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Are you ignoring him again?”

“No.”

“You remember what happened last time you ignored him.”

Ronan remembers, in acute detail, what happened the last time he avoided Kavinsky for this long. It was two semesters ago, before Kavinsky was shipped off to court-mandated rehab, before Ronan had to stop drinking so much in case something else awful ever happened to someone he cared about while he was drunk. He remembers how small K looked in the hospital bed, how wild-eyed and afraid he’d been, begging for help because he didn’t need any fucking help from them _don’t let them send me there, Lynch, I can’t go back there again_ \--“I don’t want to talk about him.”

“You don’t want to talk about Adam, either.”

“No. I don’t.” 

Noah is quiet for a very long moment before he slips his ridiculous glasses back down in front of his eyes. He considers the canvas Ronan is working on and points to a section where the shadows are giving him a bit of trouble. “If you push these any more it’ll be hard to tell what that is. Maybe lighten some of this up a bit before the paint dries.”

“Since when do you know anything about painting?”

“I have a life and hobbies.”

Ronan smiles in an unpleasant way. “I thought you were dead.”

Noah scowls. Up close, the glasses make his already big eyes seem larger. “Apparently you get my blood pressure up enough to resurrect me on occasion.” That makes Ronan strangely proud. 

***

When Ronan leaves the studio well after dark, he turns his phone back on. There are two missed calls--one from Declan, one from Gansey--a Snapchat from Matthew and a notification that Blue liked something he posted on Instagram earlier that day, and six text messages. One of the texts is from Adam, asking if he’s coming over tonight or staying home again, and the rest are all from Kavinsky.

_whats up mofo_  
_call me_  
_stop acting like a little bitch and call me back_  
_plssssss_  
_?????_

That Kavinsky had bothered to use a variation on the word “please” was enough to get Ronan to hit the phone icon at the top of the screen next to Kavinsky’s picture. He leans against the brick side of the fine arts building and listens to the phone ring and ring and ring before Kavinsky answers.

“What,” he says, “Is the point of having a fuckin’ phone if you never answer it?” He sounds very, very sober, which means he’s miserable. “I was starting to think you were avoiding me.”

“Maybe I am,” Ronan replies. He hears Kavinsky sigh on the other end of the phone, heavy, a smoker’s sigh. He can see the smoke pouring dragon-like from K’s nostrils, because he’s seen it a thousand times. “I was in the studio.”

“Such dedication.” There’s an edge to his voice there, something spiteful, because he’s jealous. Kavinsky hasn’t been able to paint since the stint in rehab and it’s killing him. “Think you can stop avoiding me and come over for a while?” It’s only now that Ronan realizes it’s quiet in the background on the other end of the call, so quiet he can hear a rhythmic clicking noise he’s sure is either K’s lighter or his switchblade. The latter makes his stomach twist uncomfortably. Kavinsky is paranoid and twitchy on his best days, even without the coke fuelling him, but lately even his sober-paranoia has taken on a more desperate tone that makes Ronan worry about another impending relapse. “My sober coach is a fucking buzzkill, man, I just shook him for the night and I’m bored. Entertain me.”

Ronan is quiet. “Isn’t he supposed to be a buzzkill? That’s kind of the point.”

“He doesn’t want us seeing each other anymore.” That hits Ronan a little harder than he thought it would, but Kavinsky keeps talking. “Fuck that. He thinks you’re a bad influence. You’re not--shit. He doesn’t get it, Lynch. You do, you always have.”

Ronan lowers his phone from his ear to check the time. It’s late, but not so late that he’s keeping Adam up and waiting for his response. Adam’s picture on Ronan’s phone is one he doesn’t know Ronan has, is of him smiling at something out of frame. He puts the phone back up to his ear. “We’re not together, K.”

Kavinsky is quiet. “I know.” He groans quietly. The ticking noise on his end of the call has stopped. Ronan checks the time again. Kavinsky clears his throat. “Come over, Lynch. Ten minutes and then you can go back to sitting on Daddy Dick’s lap and fawning over your white trash boyfriend.”

Ronan hangs up on him. Less than two seconds later, before Ronan has even pushed off the wall he’d been leaning on, his phone buzzes again, and he knows without looking at it that it’s Kavinsky fuming over being so easily dismissed. As much as he knows he should ignore the buzzing in his pocket, Ronan hears Noah from earlier reminding him of what happens when he ignores Kavinsky when he’s still on such shaky ground with sobriety and feeling the full weight of his emotional baggage for the first time in almost ten years. He sighs and pulls his phone out again.

_wtf was that_  
_what the fuck_  
_what the fuckignn_  
_come on lynch_  
_are you fuckin serious rn_  
_ronan please_  


That was an actual "please" and now Ronan feels like he should be concerned. He hits the phone icon next to Kavinsky’s name. While the other line rings a few too many times to keep his gut from knotting with fear, he looks across the quad towards the campus entrance Adam uses to get here from the other side of town and wishes he were going to be heading that way instead of to Kavinsky’s campus townhouse to talk him off a ledge.

“You,” Kavinsky says when he does finally answer, “Are an asshole.”

“You love me,” Ronan says, stamping out any of the relief he feels.

“Yeah, I do. You fucking fag, your homo’s rubbing off on me.”

“You love that, too.”

“Shut the fuck up.” He can hear the smile in Kavinsky’s voice, but he can’t tell if it’s a fond one. “So. Are you? Coming over?”

“Why yes, Joseph, I believe I am.”

“Good,” Kavinsky says. Ronan pushes off the wall again and starts to walk towards the townhouses. “I--um. It’s bad tonight. Real bad. I just don’t wanna be alone.” 

He’s talking about the depression that, really, at the heart of it all, landed him in the position he’s in now, the fractures and deep wounds that had never healed or set right in him. No one knew before, and only a handful of people knew after, and now that he’s been cornered and forced into getting help everything is torn open and broken all over again. Ronan feels bad for missing the Kavinsky he’d known before, because the one he knows now has brown eyes instead of black and he has more bad days than good ones lately. That, he’s come to realize, is what will happen to someone when they’re not allowed to self-medicate anymore after a decade of burying their skeletons in white powder. And Kavinsky doesn’t paint like he used to anymore, and watching him struggle to continue working on his projects is becoming unbearable.

He’s still talking on the other end of the phone, compulsively, because Ronan isn’t saying anything in response. “I was thinking about my dad before. That motherfucker. It’s all his fault, y’know? Like how fucked I am? Dear ol’ Dad’s doing, the bastard. I’m glad he’s fucking dead.”

In a lot of ways, Kavinsky is like Adam. Having a scumbag for a father is one of those ways, but where Adam’s just got out of prison for beating his son for years, Kavinsky’s is six feet under in an Eastern Orthodox cemetery somewhere in Bergen County and Kavinsky claims responsibility for putting him there; where Adam’s father is Appalachian white trash, Kavinsky’s was a spy of some kind for the Bulgarian mob. Kavinsky’s father, though, from what little he’s gathered, was a particular brand of scumbag that even Robert Parrish had never even thought of aspiring to that makes Kavinsky’s alleged patricide more forgivable. 

Ronan lets Kavinsky vent about his father and the old man at Starbucks that looked like him and stared for a second too long. He lets Kavinsky complain about the cravings and his sober coach and the way the prescription substances fuck with him more than the coke ever did. He lets Kavinsky seethe over his inability to paint anymore, even the stylized graffiti stuff he used to do for fun. He lets Kavinsky talk about needing new music to listen to. He’s still letting Kavinsky fill the silence when he arrives at the townhouses and interrupts him.

“I’m in the complex,” Ronan tells him. “I’ll be there in three.”

“You better.” Kavinsky hangs up first and only sounds a little disappointed at being cut shirt mid-rant about wanting to go to Seaside on break. 

He remembers Noah reminding him earlier to try harder to do right by Kavinsky if he doesn’t want to risk a repeat of what happened forty weeks ago.

“ _Don’t let him tie his sobriety to you, Ronan_ ,” Noah said. “ _That’ll just go to hell when you move on and he feels like he needs you to keep it together. Like, don’t force him to snap and, like, kidnap Matthew or blow something up or something_.” Ronan wouldn’t put it past Kavinsky given his lineage, but the idea of being a buoy for someone barely treading water doesn’t sit well with him. He’d cut ties if he really felt like it wouldn’t do more harm than good.

Ronan pauses on the sidewalk and sends a text to Adam and one to Gansey telling them to not wait up for him because he's staying at the studio overnight. 

He still gets caught up on how small Kavinsky looked in the hospital bed last summer. Ronan doesn’t want to have the image of how small he’d look in a casket burned into his mind, too.


	4. The One Where Adam Needs More Coffee

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Were you looking?”
> 
> “No. Just paying attention.”
> 
> “To me.” It’s not a question. Adam already knows the answer. 
> 
> “Yeah,” he smiles, “To you.” He knocks on Dr. Poldma’s door. “Here you are. See you on the other side, Parrish.”
> 
> Tad leaves him in the hallway and Adam feels a little sideways. He has not had enough coffee yet to have had a morning like this one.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Special thanks to Victoria and Crystal for beta-reading this one for me. You guys rock! Stay salty, bbs. <3

Reality is a funny thing. It’s very fixed, and very not, and it feels very circular and liquid, hard to lock into place and make solid. Fluid, yet immutable. Adam isn’t sure when reality started slipping through his hands, only that it does and always has for as long as he can remember. His recollection of his own life, his childhood, is hazy with patches of clarity. Clarity that has a way of sneaking up on him when he least expects it and knocks his whole world askew.

Clarity, that as it turns out, likes turning up in the middle of the night to wake him up when he’s finally managing to get a full six hours of sleep for the first time in weeks. There’s a spectre of pain and his father’s hands on him. That means he sees trees and branches at the edges of his vision and he doesn’t understand why. He does but he doesn’t. He’s not sure he ever will. His room is dark and he’s alone, but when he wakes up with his heart thrashing against his ribs and a cold sweat soaking his sheets, the shadows look like they’re moving and he has to fight the urge to scream. 

Blue hated sleeping over when they dated, because this would happen and the feeling of a body next to him used to make him panic. Ronan doesn’t seem to mind, but Adam isn’t sure Ronan actually ever sleeps. For some reason Adam has never put much thought into, having Ronan next to him when he wakes in terror never seems to bother him any. For some reason Adam has never put much thought into, having Ronan next to him is comforting.

Ronan didn’t stay over again last night. He was here, briefly, before he left to return to the studios. 

When he’s regained what little composure he really needs when he’s alone, Adam rolls onto his side to look at his clock. It’s actually still early, early for Ronan, anyway--only 11:46--and Adam feels like going to bed at 8:30 made him just as old as Blue told him he was earlier.

He managed to roll over just fine, but it takes him a minute to remember the mechanics of moving his arm towards his end table, of how to use it, of how to send Ronan a text.

_Planning on coming back? I’m up._

Adam will not be able to sleep again for a while, if at all, after the scare he just had. 

He manages to sit up, slow and stiff and shaking with spent adrenaline, the muscle memory of bracing for impact from someone he hasn’t seen in five years familiar like an aching bruise that can’t be ignored. It takes him a bit to be able to move more and get his feet on the floor, to stand up. The dim light from above his half-width stove is harsh and buzzing slightly as it casts the room in sickly yellow-orange light. The pipes are clanging, water in another apartment is running, someone above him is watching TV with the volume up and he can make out the voices clearly enough to know what show they’re watching. A few apartments over, he can feel the subtle throb of their bass through the walls. His good ear becomes more sensitive when he’s on the razor’s edge between _here_ and _not here_ , between being twenty-one year old Adam Parrish and being no one at all, and his hands are going clammy with loathsome anticipation for the moment when he slips under. It’s sick, he thinks, that he almost looks forward to dissociating because he knows it means he’ll get to rest while his body goes on autopilot for a while and shambles on without him.

He washes his face with cold water in the dark. He has to stoop over the low basin of the wall-mounted sink, but the awful light above the stove illuminated just enough of the bathroom to let him see his reflection. It’s good light to play Bloody Mary by. But, knowing his luck, he’d actually conjure something awful and homicidal. 

There is a face that isn’t his own in the mirror, just over his shoulder. It’s not a human face, just a mask, but in the hollow darkness of the holes meant for eyes, he can almost sense that it’s looking at him in the reflection rather than simply hovering behind him. Adam does not turn to look at it, but it’s very hard to not stop staring at it in the mirror as he straightens and leaves the bathroom. 

He makes a note to himself on the whiteboard hanging from the back of his front door, because he knows he might not remember to make an appointment with Dr. Poldma come morning if he slips under completely before the counselling center opens in the morning. 

He lies back down in bed and watches the clock. Ronan texts him after about an hour telling him he’s staying overnight in the studio. The rest of his night crawls by, marked only by the continued creeping of vines before his eyes and the gradually changing light coming in from outside. By four the sun is starting to rise and he gives up on sleeping entirely. By six he gets out of bed and hazards going into the bathroom to shower and brush his teeth, and he takes great care to not look in the mirror. By seven he calls the counselling center and makes his appointment for ten. By eight he’s dressed and waiting to leave. He leaves his apartment at 9 and takes the long way around campus to stop and get a red-eye from Nino’s, which he downs inhumanly fast and gets a refill of before he leaves.

By 9:45, the counselling center is empty when Adam arrives there. He signs himself in and sits down on one of the couches that make up the reception area and busies himself with a magazine he doesn’t know anything about. Five minutes later Adam hears noise coming from the work-study manned reception desk across the room, and a very ginger boy appears from behind the partition, startled that he aren’t alone.

“Oh! Sorry, didn’t hear you come in,” the boy says. He stands up to check if Adam has signed in, and Adam recognizes him--a second-semester sophomore named Tad Carruthers.

Adam doesn’t know much about Tad Carruthers save that he’s one of Noah’s interns in the philosophy department, and that his presence at the desk in the counselling center means he’s some kind of psych major. He also knows, through Noah, that Tad Carruthers has a massive crush on him, Adam Parrish, which no one can seem to explain because Adam has never spoken to him beyond idle small talk and pleasantries. Adam does not like idle small talk and pleasantries, or psych majors, or nineteen-year-olds with inexplicable crushes on him, or anyone other than Noah who reads philosophy, so Adam does not like Tad. He only feels slightly guilty about not liking Tad. 

“Hi, Tad.”

Adam is perfectly capable of being pleasant to people he does not like. Adam is perfectly capable of being pleasant to Tad.

Tad leans on the high counter beside his desk, arms crossed and his weight on his elbows. It looks uncomfortable for his back to arch that way. “What are you reading?”

Adam doesn’t even know, it was just something he’d picked up when he came in, not anything he cared about. “ _Rolling Stone_?”

Tad’s eyebrows go up as he nods. “Huh. Anything good in there? I’m not musical so...”

“Um. I have no idea, I’m not, either. I was just flipping through it.”

“Ah.” Tad says. He licks his lips. Something about the way he does it makes it seem like he’s trying to be obvious. It makes something pleasantly unpleasant twist in Adam’s stomach. “What brings you here today?” Admitting the truth is out of the question, but he’s sitting here in the middle of the day on the Saturday before spring break starts, so trying to lie seems likely to backfire. 

“I have a personal appointment. With Dr. Poldma.”

Tad’s eyebrows arch, but he shifts back to look at something on his desk. Adam assumes it’s a schedule or note left for Tad by the usual receptionist he’d spoken to on the phone this morning. “She is… in another appointment right now. Huh. It’s running long, but apparently... oh, it’s kind of serious.” Adam is vaguely affronted by how brightly Tad smiles at him. It’s not even ten and he’s not had enough coffee to be spoken to this way without it being an annoyance. “Looks like you’re stuck here with me for a while.” 

Adam forces a polite smile onto his face and nods as he goes back to flipping through the magazine he isn’t reading. Tad is quiet and his chair squeaks loudly as he sits back down and begins typing away at the computer on his desk for several long minutes. 

“So… Is it your girlfriend’s?” Tad asks. Adam looks up. All he can see of Tad from here is the top of his shaggy and very ginger head to the bridge of his very freckled nose. “The magazine, I mean.” He says it as a statement, not a question, and his brow furrows as he says it.

“What? No, no, I don’t have a girlfriend.” 

“I thought you were, y’know, with that girl, Lavender something, Noah’s friend with all the freckles.”

“Blue.”

“What?”

“Her name’s Blue.”

“Yeah, her, that’s what I said.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Adam says. “We broke up a while ago.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.” Tad doesn’t sound sorry at all. He drums his fingers against his elbow, which is decidedly more freckled than Blue’s, because Tad is decidedly more freckled than Blue is, which is to say quite freckled. Adam wonders if Tad’s back is starting to hurt from leaning over with his back arched like that. Tad shakes his shag of furiously red hair away from his face. “So… you’re not, like, seeing anyone right now?”

Adam looks back at the magazine and frowns. Ronan isn’t acting on his crush and neither is Adam, and even though Adam isn’t sore about Blue not being his girlfriend anymore, he’s not yet managed to come to terms with how she’s seeing two of their friends at the same time instead. He seems to be, indefinitely, resigned to being unattached to anyone until he can get his shit together. But the resignation doesn’t sit well with him, and instead of making peace with it he finds himself being lonely.

“I’m not seeing anyone,” he admits. He’s still looking at the cover of the book and doesn’t see how Tad reacts. 

“Well. You’re a handsome guy, I’m sure there are people out there who would be glad to know you’re single again.” Adam looks up and gives Tad a withering look, but Tad smiles brightly at him before looking back down at whatever he’s working on at his desk. In his mind, Adam hears his mother telling him “ _don’t throw compliments away, so long as they’re free_ , and it makes his heart falter because he realizes he doesn’t quite remember the sound of her voice anymore, just her cadence and the familiar drawl of her accent. His eyes sting. He goes back to pretending to read the magazine for several long minutes, listening to the slightly muffled sound of Tad’s typing and the nearly muted sound of the college’s radio station filtering in from the PA system above him.

Another ten minutes pass quietly, and then the sound of a door opening down the hall makes both Adam and Tad look up and see that it’s Dr. Poldma’s door. Tad meets Adam’s eye and signs to him, with such remarkable efficiency it takes Adam a moment to realize what he’s doing, that it’s the appointment that was running long. Adam barely has time to consider how Tad might know ASL before Kavinsky appears and seems to be wearing a sweatshirt two sizes too big for him. 

Adam recognizes the sweatshirt as the one Ronan was wearing the last time they saw each other yesterday afternoon. Something inside him feels knocked askew. Something in him feels like a burning fuse. 

Adam knows he has no right, no reason to be so hurt by this, but he is and he’s angry and hurt and very confused. And jealous. The jealousy is what bothers him the most as he watches Kavinsky walk down the hallway towards them. The sweatshirt swallows him up, and while Kavinsky has always been small and thin, it accentuates how diminished he is now that he’s clean, and that the sweatshirt is Ronan’s makes Adam even more painfully aware of the disaster Ronan barely skirted so many months ago. The panicked phone call in the middle of the night from Noah, the emergency room, the week Ronan spent in his room, the therapy and the promises--

Ronan _lied_.

It barely registers that Kavinsky pauses when he sees Adam sitting in the reception area. The harsh fluorescent lights do him no favors and make him look sallow, and when he smiles it’s almost disconcerting because of how genuine it is. He looks hollowed out and raw-edged and fragile despite how blatantly toxic he is.

“Hey, Parrish,” he says. “You look like shit.” Adam says nothing. It doesn’t deter Kavinsky in the slightest. Just over Kavinsky’s shoulder Tad meets Adam’s eye in a questioning sort of way as he picks up on the sudden change in the climate of the room. Kavinsky tsks at Adam’s silence. “Aw, did you not get any sleep because I borrowed your bed buddy? Because _I_ slept like a fuckin’ baby last night when Lynch stayed over and fucked _me_ for a change.” 

Tad’s eyes go round as saucers and his mouth makes a perfect little “o” shape. Adam thought he was angry a few moments ago, but now he’s furious--not at Ronan, but at Kavinsky for having the sheer audacity, the absolute gall, the fucking balls to say that where Adam can’t punch him in the face for it. Before Adam’s temper gets the better of him, Tad recovers and stands up behind the desk, one hand clearly on the panic button he’s wearing around his neck.

“You should go, Joe,” he says, voice firm and face stern. “I’ll pencil you in for the same time next week as usual, okay?”

“Sounds good.” Kavinsky sounds downright pleasant now, and that somehow is more offensive than what just came out of his mouth. He starts to head for the door and deliberately makes a point of passing Adam on his way out. “Don’t get your panties in a twist, Parrish, I’ll give him back only a little more banged up than he was when I borrowed him.”

Before he can trap the words behind his teeth, Adam says, very stiffly, “Keep him, then.”

Kavinsky stops short and laughs. “Oh-ho! Why’s that? You worried because you don’t know where I’ve been? Didn’t your mom teach you to share?”

“She taught me to be careful who I share with.” 

“How nice for you. My mom just taught me to share everything, except for needles. That shit’s a dirty habit, y’know.” He pulls a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and puts one between his lips. He smiles at Adam once more and leaves without another word.

There’s a few beats of silence in the reception area before Tad straightens himself up fully and exhales loudly. “Well. That happened.”

Adam nods and sets the magazine down on the chair next to him. Yes. That happened. And he’s going to fume over it for days. 

Tad fusses at his desk for another minute before coming around it to come closer to Adam. “Hey. You okay? It seemed like he hit a nerve.”

Adam shrugs. “It’s fine,” he lies. It’s not fine at all. He sighs and rubs his eyes. “He’s just a prick.”

“I guess. He’s always been cool to me. But he’s never slept with anyone I’ve been interested in before, so. Well, that I know of, anyway. It’s possible, anything’s possible.” Adam looks up at him, irritated and weary and trying to ignore the creeping tree limbs and vines at the edges of his vision. Tad looks chagrined, waves his hand and shakes his head a little. “Sorry, don’t mind me. I’m just vamping. Come on, I’ll bring you back to Dr. Poldma’s office. She’s expecting you.”

They’re the same height. For some reason, this is surprising, but that may be because, somehow, Adam thinks of Tad as being a kid despite only being two years older than him. He waits for Adam to get up and then matches his pace as they head down the hall towards Dr. Poldma’s office, Tad walking with him rather than leading, because they both know Adam knows where to go and just can’t go past the reception desks without an escort.

“Hey, um,” Adam says as they’re about halfway down the hallway. Tad looks at him with eyes that are much darker and more hazel than he expected them to be. “You, before, you signed at me. How did you know?”

“That you hear in mono instead of surround?” Tad asks. Adam frowns slightly at the metaphor but nods. Tad shrugs. “It’s noted in your counseling documentation, in case you ever need special assistance or an aide. Those requests go through us at the desk and we arrange to set you up with the right equipment or assistant.”

“Oh.”

“But I knew anyway, I didn’t have to see the flag on your files.”

“Oh?”

Tad gestures to his own ears, which are hidden under his hair. “I’m studying special ed, with a focus on ASL and deafness. My sister’s deaf, and hearing loss runs in my family. I could just tell.”

“Were you looking?”

“No. Just paying attention.”

“To me.” It’s not a question. Adam already knows the answer. 

“Yeah,” Tad smiles, “To you.” He knocks on Dr. Poldma’s door. “Here you are. See you on the other side, Parrish.”

Tad leaves him in the hallway and Adam feels a little sideways. He has not had enough coffee yet to have had a morning like this one.


	5. The One With Clay

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m not stressed.”
> 
> “Adam. ‘Stressed’ is your middle name.”
> 
> “I don’t have a middle name.”
> 
> “Yeah, you do. I just said it.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Has it really been so long since I last updated this? I can't believe it, but real life has been a disaster and I took a step back from things for a while, but I'm back and updates will come more often again, I promise!

_“Have you thought more about the trees? Why it’s always trees and vines you see and never anything else?”_

_“No, not really. I mean, yeah, I have, but not in a long time. I don’t understand it, either. I grew up pretty far away from any wooded areas like that, but it’s always been what I see when I… you know. Slip under.”_

Blue is looking at him strangely. “Hey. Are you okay?”

“What? Um, yeah. I’m fine. Why?”

“You keep spacing out,” she says, dropping the book of fabric swatches she was flipping through. Her expression seems guarded or unsure, but Adam can’t meet her eye enough to try and figure out what she’s really thinking. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Adam nods again and opens a different sample booklet to appear normal. He realizes belatedly that he’s reading it upside down and frowns as he rights it. Blue is at his elbow continuing to watch him very carefully. 

“Adam.” 

“Blue.”

“Is it bad today?” She frowns. “You’re all flat and mumbly.”

_“It’s been awhile since I’ve seen you twice in one week, Adam. How bad was it last night?”_

“Yeah,” he says. He’s all flat and mumbly. “It’s bad today.”

_“Worse than it’s been in a while. I couldn’t sleep after. Every time I started dozing off I could hear him and feel his hands on me--”_

They’re in a different part of the store without Adam knowing how or when they moved from the fabrics to the sculpting supplies. He’s holding three bricks of metallic polymer clay and can’t remember why, only that they’ve been in his hand long enough to be soft and pliable around the edges. He turns the bricks over in his hands and tries to remember why he felt the need to pick them up. “Did I say why I needed these?” 

Blue puts down the set of detailing tools she was examining to look at the clay in his hands. “Um, no, you didn’t. I didn’t even see you pick those up. I thought you didn’t like clay?”

“I don’t.” He wanders off to find the aisle he’d taken the clay from and Blue follows him, her boots heavy on the unpadded carpet of the store’s flooring. He tries to smooth the edges of the bricks back into their original shape. “It’s too soft. If I can’t take a blowtorch to it I never have any luck with it.”

“To be fair, that’s the kind of clay that needs to be fired to hold it’s shape,” Blue says. She has a set of knitting needles tucked behind her ears, and he’s sure she didn’t have them a few minutes ago. She takes one of the bricks from him and examines it, testing how malleable it’s become in his hands with her own. “This might be a nice change for you. Smaller and easier to un-do, for when you’re in a bad way.” She purses her lips. “Like today.”

He takes the brick back from her. “What do you mean?”

“Well, like...oh, Gansey, right? He has his mint thing, and the thing he does when he rubs his lip or his ears, right?” Adam nods. Gansey’s nervous habits are more like tics when he’s feeling anxious. “Having something that’s a little softer than your usual stuff might be good when you’re stressed.”

“I’m not stressed.”

“Adam. ‘Stressed’ is your middle name.”

“I don’t have a middle name.”

“Yeah, you do. I just said it.”

_“I think it’s time you reconsider my suggestion that you go to a support group.”_

_“No. Never.”_

_“Adam.”_

_“No, Doctor.”_

_“You have PTSD, Adam. Support from people who have been through what you have might help you.”_

They’re on line at the art supply store and Adam has the clay in his hands again. It’s tacky in its plastic wrappings, pliable from the heat of his and Blue’s hands. It’s like his subconscious is telling him to buy it, because he thought he’d left it in the aisle it belonged in. 

Blue is beside him, cradling yarn and coupons and silk flowers and pieces of fancy scrapbook paper. She smiles up at him and leans her head against his bicep for a fraction of a second. Adam’s heart vibrates in his chest cavity, kicking to life for the first time in days since someone last touched him kindly. He clears his throat. The cashier calls for the next customer. Blue nudges him to go ahead of her. Adam remembers what he has to do here and moves forward to the counter. The cashier is friendly and chirpy and smiling widely at him, but all Adam can think of is how her smile looks dangerous and vaguely threatening with all those metal-covered teeth. Orthodontic teeth. With pink and green rubber bands around the brackets of her braces, springy Easter colors.

Adam never had braces. He’s lucky to have straight teeth without them. Braces were a luxury his parents couldn’t afford. It’s just as well, because chances are one of Adam’s teeth would’ve been broken or one of the brackets would’ve gone through his lip or cheek at some point, because there was no way in all seven circles of hell that Robert Parrish would think to not hit his kid in the face just because of some expensive dentistry getting in the way.

Adam pays for his things and takes the bag from the cashier, stepping aside to wait for Blue to check out. The cashier keeps looking at him and smiling, and Blue pretends to not notice. Eventually they’re able to leave, and the girl waves cheerily at them. 

“Bye, have a good day! Happy spring!”

“Aw,” Blue says when they get outside. “She likes you. What is it about your weird face that drives all the girls so crazy?”

Adam frowns and touches his jaw. “Hey, you liked my weird face once.”

“Before I knew any better,” Blue says. She gives him a gentle nudge, her elbow against his, to show she’s joking. “I still do, just in a different way than I did back then. Ronan likes your weird face now, though. Him and Braceface can start a fanclub for you.”

“I think Tad can join it, too.”

“Tad?” He nods, she blinks. “Noah’s intern, the ginger?” When Adam nods again, Blue’s eyes go round and her mouth gets small, then she starts to laugh. He knows to anticipate her hand grasping his arm for support and manages to contain his desire to flinch at the sudden contact.

_“So… you’re not, like, seeing anyone right now?”_

Adam isn’t seeing anyone right now. He thought--he doesn’t know what he thought anymore. He would normally brush off Kavinsky’s jibes as empty talk spewed to simply get under his skin, but the evidence to the contrary, that the little bastard may have been telling the truth, sits uneasily on his frayed-nerves and shattered sense of centeredness.

_“ **I** slept like a fuckin’ baby when Lynch stayed over and fucked **me** for a change.”_

Ronan was M.I.A. last night. Kavinsky was wearing the last thing Adam had seen Ronan wearing yesterday. Ronan, secretive and honest Ronan, outright lied about where he was and Adam was stupid enough to believe it. Ronan lied to Adam and wasn’t there when Adam's memory turned on him and made him afraid and weak and vulnerable, to be with Kavinsky instead.

Ronan, who has been nursing a crush on Adam for years now, lied to go and sleep with someone else. Someone toxic who has already hurt him more than once before.

_“I’ll give him back only a little more banged up than he was.”_

He and Ronan aren’t anything but friends, but it still stings. Blue is looking at him strangely again.

“Sorry,” he says. He wonders if he should say anything to her about it, or about how bad a way he’s really in today. “Just a lot on my mind.”

Blue smiles at him, a little sadly, and puts her hand on his elbow. “When has that ever not been true?” She gives his arm a squeeze and trots ahead to beat him to the crosswalk. 

“Do you think I should go to a support group?” he asks her. “Dr. Poldma’s on me for going to one on campus for abuse survivors, she keeps saying it’ll help get my head straight to be around people who can empathize with me that way.”

Blue tilts her head side to side, considering. She never brought such a thing up to him as a serious suggestion like Dr. Poldma has, but she did point out the posters for the group the first time she noticed them on campus. Blue is a community-oriented being, a creature still wholly foreign to solitary Adam, and the benefits of group activities of all kinds are ones she can weigh objectively for him in a way he’s incapable of. Despite their falling out and the lingering tension between them, they’re still friends and there’s still love there and he still trusts her counsel as much, if not more than, Gansey’s or Ronan’s or Noah’s.

“It couldn’t hurt,” she says. The light changes and they get the signal to cross the street. “I mean, you’re probably overdue for airing that out for someone other than Dr. Poldma, and it’s not like any of us can begin to understand what you’ve been through. Hearing other people talk about their own abuse might help you start to get a handle on those nightmares, and helping other people cope with theirs might help you make sense of it all more objectively.” She trips on a crack in the sidewalk but recovers quickly, huffily, as if the concrete did it on purpose. “I think you should go, even just to check it out.”

“I don’t suppose I get to bring a guest, do I?” he asks. He knows the answer already, but the thought of Blue at his side to bolster him at a gathering of strangers is comforting.

She shakes her head. “Sorry. Would if I could, you know?”

“Yeah, I know. Thanks, Blue.”

“No problem.”

They walk two blocks before either of them speak again, enjoying their regained ability to enjoy each other’s company in silence without forcing awkward post-relationship conversation, and enjoying the mild early March weather. The grass, where visible, is brownish and soaked with mud and melting snow, the trees weeping with dripping icicles and the air still biting enough to turn cheeks pink and make noses run. 

They approach Nino’s and duck inside. It’s warm and busy as they make their way to the back corner where they know Gansey will be installed with his laptop. 

Adam wonders if Gansey knows Ronan lied about where he was last night. He’s not sure what answer he’d rather hear if he were to ask: that Ronan was home and Kavinsky was lying and wearing a pilfered sweatshirt, or that Gansey really believes that Ronan was at the studio all night working on his painting and Kavinsky came by the damning hoodie honestly.

_“You worried because you don’t know where I’ve been?”_

Honestly, both answers make Adam want to punch something.


	6. The One Where Aurora Invites Adam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Your girlfriend?” his mother asks. She seems hopeful; she’s not overly fond of Declan’s girlfriend and Matthew’s still a little young emotionally to be interested in dating yet. Ronan thinks that, if he were so inclined as to date a woman, she would not be the type of girl he’d bring home to meet his mother.
> 
> He shakes his head as he pockets his phone again. “Just Gansey.”
> 
> “Your other half, then,” she says, smiling. Noah calls it a “truly awe-inspiring bromance”. Adam, derisively and only once, called them codependent. Blue has, on more than one occasion, introduced him as Gansey’s boyfriend. Ronan has been friends with Gansey for nearly half their lives now, so at this point they’re either common-law married or platonic life partners as far as the world is concerned; sometimes all of the jokes seem true, but sometimes it just doesn’t sit well with him and itches under his skin.

Across from Ronan at the rustic chic farm-to-table restaurant she managed to drag him into, Aurora Lynch is smiling. Aurora Lynch is always smiling, placid and positive and sincere and everything her two older sons are not. 

He’s out to lunch with his mother, as he always is on Saturday afternoons. Saturdays have been for sitting with his mother for the last four years, because Sundays are for going to church with his brothers and every other Wednesday is for visiting his father’s grave; it used to be every Wednesday was for visiting his father’s grave, but now he doesn’t feel the need to go that often anymore. He tries to tell himself that it’s not guilt keeping him away, but he prides himself on being honest and, honestly, it is guilt.

“You’re distracted today,” she says. Her alto voice and familiar, foreign accent soften the gentle accusation in her words, and he looks at the grain of the subtly green-tinted wood table. Like a good Irish Catholic boy from a not-so-good Irish Catholic family, he feels guilty. 

“Sorry, just a lot on my mind,” he says. 

“Oh, Ronan.” She reaches across the table to put her hand over his. “You’re just like your father that way. Would you like to talk about it?”

“No.” It’s a few beats too late to not sound like he’s lying. “It’s fine.” Because Ronan is a good Catholic, he has never quite told his mother or brothers, and never had the chance to tell his father, that he’s gay. Because he’s guilty about it. He’s also guilty about having acted on that fact, on more than one occasion, because until recently he didn’t see the point in waiting until marriage because marriage had been well outside the realm of possibility. However, he knows Declan knows about him and Kavinsky, and he knows Matthew, at the very least, suspects his feelings about Adam. The look Aurora gives him now makes him wonder if her motherly intuition is telling her that the suspicions of her other sons are based in reality. He forces a small smile for her, and she beams with delight. “Just my project.”

“I was thinking about that just the other day. You’ve never told me what you’ve been painting for so long, you know. My _fechín_ is so secretive, even with his own mother.”

“It’s a series. I don’t want anyone to see it until it’s complete.”

She tilts her head, a picture of gentle confusion. “I thought it was just one painting?”

“One project, five paintings. It’s the last one before I’m done with them all.” He pushes a french fry around the edge of his plate with another. “Everyone thinks it’s just one painting. That’s what I wanted.”

“Ah.” She nods, and he can tell she doesn’t really understand it, but his mother isn’t a creative, dreamy creature like her son or her late husband. He doesn’t expect her to understand. “Well. I’ll make sure I’m here to see it at the year-end exhibition, and I won’t let Declan tell me he can’t come. I wouldn’t miss it for the world and I’ll be damned if he misses it, too.”

Ronan stops fussing with his food. “I don’t want him there if he’s just going to make excuses and complain and bring his tacky girlfriend with him. Just come with Matthew.”

“He’s your brother,” she says. She frowns, and it’s such a small, sad thing it barely registers but hurts him like a motherfucker, like a bee sting. “He should be there to support you.”

“He doesn’t support me. He never has, and he never will. If he’s going to come and be a dick about everything and say shit like ‘you’re wasting your time going to art school’ and be a twat--” Aurora interrupts him to chastise him for his language. He groans. “I just don’t want him to be there to ruin it for me, Mom. I don’t care if he wants me to wear a tie for a living, we’re richer than God and I don’t need to do anything I don’t want to because we’re blessed. I want to be allowed to make things and work the farm, that’s all.”

Aurora looks even sadder, but she nods because she know he’s right. She wants her sons to love each other and be happy again, like they were before her husband died, but she knows the chances of that happening are about as likely as a snowball’s chance in Hell. “If that’s how you feel about it, there will be no changing your mind, I know. I won’t bring Declan if you don’t want him there.”

In his pocket, Ronan feels his phone buzz. He’d usually ignore it, but his mother hears it and gives him a reproachful look, and he has no choice but to take it out. It’s Gansey, asking him if he’ll swing by Nino’s after he’s done with his mom. He sends back a thumbs-up emoji to confirm that, yes, he will be going to Nino’s after he’s done with his mom. As if he had anything more important that going to Nino’s and sitting there for a few hours doing nothing with his friends, as if he ever, really, does anything else with his free time.

“Your girlfriend?” his mother asks. She seems hopeful; she’s not overly fond of Declan’s girlfriend and Matthew’s still a little young emotionally to be interested in dating yet. Ronan thinks that, if he were so inclined as to date a woman, she would not be the type of girl he’d bring home to meet his mother.

He shakes his head as he pockets his phone again. “Just Gansey.”

“Your other half, then,” she says, smiling. Noah calls it a “truly awe-inspiring bromance”. Adam, derisively and only once, called them codependent. Blue has, on more than one occasion, introduced him as Gansey’s boyfriend. Ronan has been friends with Gansey for nearly half their lives now, so at this point they’re either common-law married or platonic life partners as far as the world is concerned; sometimes all of the jokes seem true, but sometimes it just doesn’t sit well with him and itches under his skin. Today, as much as he knows he loves Gansey more than he loves Declan, it itches uncomfortably.

As she continues on, gushing about Gansey as she always does, he’s struck by how like Matthew she looks. Or rather, how like her Matthew is. They have the same smile, the same hair, the same mannerisms. But Matthew, like Ronan and Declan, has Niall Lynch’s eyes and nose and was the only one of the three to naturally have their father’s charm and good humor. Where Declan resembled his brothers and his father, he had nothing of their mother in him aside from a cleft in his chin; Ronan looked like Niall and sounded like Niall minus the accent and had his father’s penmanship, and inherited the instinct to nurture from Aurora alongside her slenderness, her fragile wrists.

“Stop chewing on those filthy things,” Aurora hisses, reaching across the table to gently pull Ronan’s wrist away from his mouth. She takes his hand and holds it in both of hers, his palm facing the ceiling. Under his leather bracelets, vicious pink and white scars cross over the delta of blue veins on his own fragile wrist. She tuts and puts one of her fingers under the leather and gently strokes a particularly nasty scar. She hadn’t been around when Ronan got that one, and for that he’s grateful--his tender-hearted mother would have been beside herself in grief had she been able to bear witness to what her most troubled son managed to do to himself. “Ah, _fechín_ , will you ever stop worrying your mother so?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. He pulls away to dislodge her from under his bracelets and catches her hand in his. It makes her smile sadly. He wants to stop worrying her, worrying Matthew, worrying Gansey and Noah and Adam and Blue. He wants to stop worrying about disappointing his dead father and wants to stop hating Declan for not grieving in a language he can understand and he wants to stop feeling guilty for being gay and he wants to make sure Kavinsky’s gonna be okay. He wants to act on his feelings for Adam instead of endlessly skirting the line between whatever they are now to something easier to define. “I really don’t know.”

********

After he gets his mother back to her car, Ronan makes good on his word and goes to Nino’s. It’s packed, as it always is in the early afternoon, and he has to force himself through the coffee-craving throng of students and professionals and families to get to the corner where he knows he’ll always, unfailingly, find the people he’s looking for. Noah is absent, probably doing something TA-related in his office back on campus, but Gansey and Adam and Blue are all huddled together on the couch. Blue is sitting behind Gansey on the back of the couch, bracketing him between her thighs, her hands on his shoulders and her DIY fashionista clothes clashing terribly with his preppy designer outfit, but somehow they’ve managed to color coordinate with each other. In a sideways kind of way, they don’t clash at all. On the other end of the couch, Adam is hunched slightly forward, staring blankly into a cup of tea as if it contains the secrets of the cosmos. Everything about him seems more subdued than usual, and that is an accomplishment. 

“Hey,” Gansey says. Blue lifts her fingers away from Gansey’s collarbone for a moment in greeting, and Adam doesn’t look up from his tea. “How’s your mom?”

“Same as ever,” Ronan says as he perches on the edge of the coffee table across from the three of them. He must be in Adam’s periphery, because he looks up and seems dully surprised that Ronan is in front of him. He smiles politely, but here’s little recognition, if any, behind it. He had an episode last night, Ronan’s brain tells him, filling in the blanks between Adam’s manner and Gansey’s weighted look. Ronan feels horrible for not being with him when it happened. To hide the guilt and concern, he leans forward to shove Adam’s knee. “Is this thing on?”

“Ha ha.” Adam’s intonation is a little flat, but there’s a flicker of awareness across his face that indicates that he’s not as disconnected as he sounds. “I’m a robot, very funny. Like you’ve never said that one before.”

It’s better than no response at all. Ronan nudges him again. “If you’d stop buffering I wouldn’t have to make the joke, Parrish.”

Blue makes an irritable sound in her throat. “Don’t be such a shitbag.” She glares at him and he glares back. 

“It’s okay, Blue,” Gansey says, patting her hand. “Ronan just needs to be an ass because he’s spent the last two hours pretending to be nice for his mom.”

“I can’t how trying that must be,” Blue mutters. “To be decent and not an asshole for such a long period of time. What an ordeal! Poor thing.”

“Poor thing,” Adam echos, smiling faintly. He nudges Ronan’s shin with his shoe. “How’s she doing? Your mom?”

“She’s good. She says hi.” In his periphery, Ronan can see that Gansey looks a little hurt. To make it stop, he says, “She said hi to you, too. Jesus, Gansey, you looked like a kicked puppy.”

Blue flicks Gansey’s ear to get his attention. “Don’t worry, everyone still loves you. Everything’s still right in the universe.”

He sighs heavily at Gansey’s wounded look and turns to face Adam fully, bracketing him between his spread knees, so they can see eye to eye. Adam manages eye contact for a fraction of a second before looking somewhere in the vicinity of Ronan’s chin instead. In this light, Adam’s hair and skin are almost the same color. Ronan can visualize the Pantone swatch he’d use as Adam’s base, how he’d mix it slightly green to map out the veins underneath the thinner skin on the insides of his wrists, his forearms and elbows, the backs of his hands, the fragile skin of his eyelids. He’d mix it a little darker to make the constellations of Adam’s freckles and the shadows around his eyes, a touch pinker for his lips. Ronan says, “She invited you to come with for Easter if you don’t wanna be alone.”

“That’s nice of her,” Blue says as she slides off the back of the couch to sit between Adam and Gansey. She puts a hand on Adam for a moment and Ronan simmers with jealousy over the the familiarity of her fingers and how they curl over the curve of Adam’s shoulder. ”You should take her up on that.” She gives Adam a pat and turns to Gansey to show him the contents of a big reusable shopping bag at her feet. Ronan likes Blue more than he generally cares to let on, but there are times when he absolutely, completely hates her; those moments are generally the ones that remind him that she was originally introduced into their fold by Adam, back when she’d been his girlfriend, back when they were sleeping together. 

It’s impossible to forget, and worse to dwell on. The worst part is how, when he remembers that fact, he gets curious and thinks about it and the envy of what they had and what they did burns him because he’s petty and incurably jealous of Blue.

“It’s still, like, a month away,” Adam says. His voice is lower than usual, an undertone to the noise around them, and Ronan has to lean in closer to him--strictly speaking, he doesn’t need to, but Adam’s mumbling is a good excuse to do it anyway. “Can I think about it?”

Ronan shrugs. “You can think about it until the morning I’m heading down there. Hell, call and I’ll come back for you if it means I can enjoy a little more time before seeing Declan ruins the holiday for me completely.” 

The fine line between Adam’s brows gets more pronounced. Blue and Gansey exchange a look. Ronan gets up to check the specials board. In his pocket, his phone buzzes. As he stands behind a young mom with a very judgemental-looking baby on her hip, he takes it out.

_saw ur car @ ninos_  
_bring me a 4x red eye when u come by_  
_ill give u ur hoodie back if u do_

He glances back at Gansey and Adam and Blue. Gansey’s saying something that’s making Blue laugh and Adam smile, and Ronan’s heart tightens like a fist. The judgemental baby glares at him and shakes a golf ball-sized fist at him menacingly, as if it’s warning him to make his next decision very carefully. He reads Kavinsky’s texts again and mutes his phone before returning it to his pocket. 

When he gets back to them, Blue has gotten up to go and chat with a girl Ronan thinks she works with or has a bunch of classes with, and Gansey and Adam are talking about psychology. Ronan sits down between them in the space Blue has vacated, leaning back and spreading one arm over the back of the couch behind Adam. Their thighs are touching, from knee to hip, when there’s room for Ronan to not be touching him at all. Adam sets his mug on the coffee table and leans back, the crown of his head resting on Ronan’s forearm. 

Ronan was thinking of getting rid of that hoodie anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The name Aurora calls Ronan, _fechín_ , means "little raven" in Irish.


	7. The One With Takeout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Jesus, how much did you spend on all this?”
> 
> “Don’t worry about it.” Ronan takes the last container out and places it in Adam’s hand. It’s huge and practically overflowing and reeks of peanuts. “You said you were craving pad thai the other day when I got you from work, remember?”
> 
> Adam didn’t remember. He was usually pretty fried when he was done with a shift at the garage. “But you did.”
> 
> Ronan scoffs and turns away, but not before Adam can see his cheeks flushing pink. “It’s just noodles, Parrish, not a marriage proposal.”
> 
> “If it is, I’m a little disappointed. A ring would’ve been nice.”
> 
> “You’re a welder. Just make one out of scrap if you want one so bad.”

Noah is glaring at Adam from behind the back of the couch. Adam has no idea why he’s doing this, so he raises his eyebrows in question over the top of his mug.

“Enjoying the view?”

“Maybe,” Noah says, noncommittal and vague. It’s meaningless, but it still manages to make Adam feel pleasantly, barely warm for a single second. He’s realized over the last few days that he’s starved for affection, and this just seems to drive that point home. Noah resumes his scowling. “Have you been talking to Tad?”

Adam lowers his mug. “Yeah, a little. Why?”

Noah narrows his eyes. “Just wondering why my only competent intern this semester is suddenly less useful. He gets this weird little look on his face whenever he hears me talking about you to Blue. I know he has a crush on you, but he wasn’t, like, one step below writing ‘Mr. Tad Parrish’ on his notebooks until a week ago.”

Adam shrugs and turns away to pretend to fuss with his mug. He and Tad have been talking. A little. It might be more accurate to say Tad has been talking to him. Adam has been to the counseling center a total of four times in the last week, twice to see Dr. Poldma and twice to see his academic counselor about the summer courses he’s planning to enroll in, so he’s seen Tad quite a lot recently. He has not seen Kavinsky there again, and he’s also seen little of Ronan.

Adam still hasn’t gotten any definitive answer as to what exactly happened with Ronan and Kavinsky last week. He tried to ignore it, because he thought he and Ronan made progress towards the ephemeral something that they seem to always be working towards. Not knowing what Ronan’s thinking is so uncomfortable it makes Adam’s skin itch.

It’s very easy to tell what Tad is thinking. Tad’s uncomplicated, straightforward affection is refreshing and simple. It’s flattering, even if Tad himself is sort of tiring and makes Adam feel actually middle-aged. It’s made him realize that he hasn’t had any potential romantic prospects since Blue broke up with him, the weird something with Ronan notwithstanding. Tad is completely unsubtle about his crush, and Adam may be indulging him, just a little, because it’s nice to feel wanted by someone who’s fairly attractive.

 

“You remember being nineteen, right?” Adam says. Noah gives him a reproachful look. “Just because I let Tad chatter at me when I have to go to the counseling center doesn’t mean anything.”

“It does to him, he thinks you’re paying special attention,” Noah says. He sits up and leans on the back of the couch. “Please don’t encourage him, Adam. I know you’re frustrated with the Ronan thing--” Adam scoffs and Noah ignores him. “And I get that Tad is like an ego stroke for you, but, like, don’t go and corrupt the youth, okay? It would kill Ronan.”

Adam scoffs again and sets his mug down with more force than is strictly necessary. Some of the coffee inside sloshes out onto the counter and he busies himself with cleaning it up. “Right, okay. Because it would kill him because I’m sick of waiting for him to work through whatever Catholic guilt bullshit he’s still working through and want to get on with my life. I’m not taking a vow of celibacy while I wait for another two and a half years.” He half-turns to point at Noah, stopping him before he can say anything. “I know it’s been a while, don’t even go there.”

Noah bites his cheek, his mouth going a little crooked. He, of all people, because of Blue, knows exactly how long it’s been. “I wasn’t gonna say.”

“But you were thinking it,” Adam says.

Noah makes a vague sound and waggles his hand a little. “Well. Yeah.” He kneels on the couch’s seat and props himself up on his elbows on its back. “I do know how you feel, you know? And I get it, I really do, but seriously, is sleeping with some kid, just because he likes you and wants you to bend him over the nearest sturdy surface, going to make you feel any better? Is even considering it making the Ronan thing less frustrating?” Adam sets his jaw and says nothing. Noah sighs and hangs his head in resignation. “Fine, I tried. Do what you want, then, I guess. You have my permission to make Tad completely useless if it’ll make you happy.”

Adam isn’t sure it’ll make him happy, and he’s not sure he even wants to sleep with Tad, but he knows he doesn’t mind the ego stroke of his attention and that he really is sick of waiting around for Ronan. “Thanks, I guess.”

Noah looks up again. “I feel like I just gave away my daughter’s hand in marriage.”

“Isn’t saying it like that a little… problematic?”

“Sure it is, _Blue_.”

Adam can’t help but smile, and at the same moment the apartment’s front door bangs open to reveal Blue and Gansey with pizza from somewhere new just off campus, and behind them Ronan and his little brother Matthew with Thai takeout from a place across town with a ridiculous pun for a name and a yuppie white girl with dreadlocks at the hostess stand. Blue balances two pizza boxes expertly on her shoulder and nudges the sliding door between the entry and the apartment’s main room with her foot. No one helps her because they all know from experience that she’ll get snappish if they even try. Matthew edges past Gansey’s shoulder and beams at Adam.

“Hi!” he says. “I didn’t know you liked Thai-Abolical! They have the best dim sum in town.”

“Yeah. Yeah, they do.” Adam frowns slightly, but Matthew’s already gone to greet Noah. To Ronan, he says, “I didn’t ask you guys to go by there for me.”

Ronan claps him on the shoulder as he sets a big paper bag full of food on the counter beside Adam’s mug. “Relax, Matthew wanted one of those stupid teas and coconut rice. We were stopping there anyway.” What Ronan means is that he knew Adam wouldn’t ask even though he wanted to, so he planted the idea in Matthew’s head so Adam couldn’t refuse. Adam moves his coffee out of the way and starts taking white and clear plastic containers and white cardboard cartons from Ronan as they’re pulled out of the bag.

“Jesus, how much did you spend on all this?”

“Don’t worry about it.” Ronan takes the last container out and places it in Adam’s hand. It’s huge and practically overflowing and reeks of peanuts. “You said you were craving pad thai the other day when I got you from work, remember?”

Adam didn’t remember. He was usually pretty fried when he was done with a shift at the garage. “But you did.”

Ronan scoffs and turns away, but not before Adam can see his cheeks flushing pink. “It’s just noodles, Parrish, not a marriage proposal.”

“If it is, I’m a little disappointed. A ring would’ve been nice.”

“You’re a welder. Just make one out of scrap if you want one so bad.”

“It’s not the same if you get a ring for yourself,” Blue says. She’s leaning against the arm of the couch with her feet in Noah’s lap and a piece of avocado pizza in her hands. Her fingers are covered in rings, and she takes one off her slice to waggle them at Noah and Gansey. “Hint hint, boys. I’ll be expecting two when the time comes.”

“That’s surprisingly conventional for you, Jane,” Gansey says. From his desk chair, he gestures towards her and Noah with his own slice. “We thought you were going to propose to us.”

“I was hoping it would be soon, too,” Noah adds, “I’m not getting any younger.”

“I thought the dead didn’t age.” Ronan sits on the floor across from Noah’s place on the couch.

Noah sniffs indignantly and flips him off, but the insult of it is lacking because he has some pizza sauce on his cheek. Adam sits between Ronan and Matthew, who is taking a selfie with his food. Matthew is perplexing in a lot of the same ways Ronan is, but for completely different reasons, and Adam wonders if that’s because he’s only seventeen and teenagers these days are very different than how Adam remembers them being when he was in high school. 

“Ghosts wear sheets and brides wear veils,” Matthew says. “So they kind of look alike. Maybe you should wear a veil when you get married, Noah, so you can be properly spooky at the altar.”

Blue points at Gansey and grins her jackal grin. “And Gansey can wear his jerkin.” 

“Gherkin. It’s a _gher_ kin.”

“Like the pickle?”

“Like a tunic.”

“So it’s a dress?”

“Gansey’s gonna wear a dress?!”

“I’m not going to wear a dress!”

“But you were gonna wear a pickle costume?”

Over the overlapping chatter, Adam leans over to Ronan. “They should just get married around so they don’t all look like crazy people.”

Ronan nods at Gansey’s pink checkered shirt and Blue’s crochet tights and homemade dress and Noah’s bright red jeans and pastel hair. “Too late.”

Adam laughs. Before the other four can get any more distracted, he asks, “Are we going to watch the movie or not?”

After another several long minutes of bickering over what movie they’d actually decided to watch before Gansey, Blue, Ronan, and Matthew went out to pick up dinner, they all compromise on _Young Frankenstein_ and put it on mute to supply the dialogue themselves. Gansey, they find out, does a very good impression of Marty Feldman, which is only narrowly beat out by Adam’s Madeline Kahn and Blue’s Kenneth Mars. Sometime after midnight, after the movie is long over and they’ve played a very rambunctious three hour game of Cards Against Humanity and Adam’s had two more cups of coffee, Ronan and Adam are the only ones left awake. Matthew, about an hour before Blue started to doze off on the floor, was set up in Noah’s room for the night, has been asleep for hours, and Blue had to be gently coaxed slightly awake and carried off to Gansey’s room to go to bed with Noah while Gansey stayed up to read. 

The apartment is very quiet compared to how noisy it was earlier. Adam is stretched over the entire couch, slightly too long-limbed to fit on it comfortably, and flipping through the Instagram app on Ronan’s phone while Ronan makes a tower in the center of the coffee table out of the refuse from the evening. 

“It’s so late,” Adam murmurs. His voice seems very loud, but Ronan doesn’t shush him or indicate that he spoke above an appropriate volume. “I have work tomorrow. Today. Whatever.”

“Go sleep,” Ronan whispers back at him. “I still have some of your stuff from the last time you crashed here.”

Adam closes the app and locks the screen. The room is nearly black as pitch until his eyes adjust to the dim light under the microwave. “Do you have my Coke shirt? I’ve been looking for it.”

“Yeah, it’s here. It’s in my room.”

“Cool.”

Even though it’s dark, he can see Ronan watching him from the corner of his eye. It would be so easy to pull him into a kiss, to ask about what happened with Kavinsky, to explain his frustration with their game of gay chicken and demand a definitive answer. But he doesn’t. He hands Ronan his phone back. “Wanna go to bed?”  
He can hear Ronan swallow. “Yeah, okay.”

They get up and carefully pick their way through the dark to Ronan’s room. They don’t turn on the lights and Ronan finds his dresser in the dark, pulling out a pair of sweats and a shirt for them both, and they get changed in the dark, on opposite sides of the bed. It’s so dark that even if they were to turn and try to see each other, they couldn’t see anything. It’s awkward and a little difficult, especially with Adam’s hearing already so compromised and unbalanced to orient him in the dark, but he manages to not accidentally hit anything and gets into bed without any trouble. The mattress is of a quality that doesn’t dip enough under his weight to disturb Ronan, who’s already laying down.

“Hey,” Ronan whispers.

“Mm?”

“You’re all up on my side of the bed, man.”

“Sorry, I couldn’t tell. I left my night vision goggles at home.”

“Ha ha.” Adam barely feels Ronan roll onto his side. “When do you have to be at the garage?”

“Um.” Adam thinks. “Like two? I’m on two to ten.”

“I’ll drive you. I need an oil change anyway.”

Adam reaches out and pokes what feels like Ronan’s chest. “‘Need’ one the way you were already gonna stop at Thai-Abolical?”

“Don’t be dramatic,” Ronan says. “You’re a mechanic, you know cars need their oil changed.”

“Mm.” Adam taps Ronan’s chest again. “You seem to get yours done a lot. Do you just like hanging out with me at work? Boyd hates that.”

“I know.”

“So why do you do it?”

Ronan nudges Adam’s shin with his foot. “You know why.”

“Do I?”

“Do you?”

“Mm.” They lapse into silence. After a while, when Adam can feel that Ronan’s fallen asleep, he whispers into the darkness. “You could just say you like me, you know.”

Ronan doesn’t answer.


	8. The One Where Gansey Fails at Veganism

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam lightly punches Gansey’s shoulder and gets a smile out of him. “You’ll fit right in if you can stick to it eventually. But you’ll have to start buying hemp polo shirts instead of cotton ones--wait, can you still wear Lacoste if you’re a vegan? The little alligator logo seems like it would be an issue.”
> 
> “I’m more concerned about my Vineyard Vines. The whale is definitely more controversial than the alligator.”
> 
> “Oh, god forbid,” Blue says, voice flat. “Not your Vineyard Vines. Whatever shall we do if you can’t wear your neon-pastel atrocities.”
> 
> “Party hard,” Noah says. “We’ll celebrate the collapse of the bourgeois stranglehold on your fashion sense.”
> 
> “And prepare the revolution against the new bourgeois hippie clothes you’ll have to start wearing instead,” Adam adds. He and Adam clink their mugs together in a toast. “Fuck Free People.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I meant to have this posted for Christmas and I just couldn't get the time to finish it, so have a slightly delayed holiday chapter that is sure to break hearts and/or disappoint. I'm mean!

Adam wakes up in Ronan’s bed the next morning, much earlier than he’d like, and it’s still dark and he’s alone. The door is cracked open and the other side of the bed is still warm, so Adam assumes Ronan is coming back and he starts to doze off again. He’s laying on his right side and he can’t hear much of anything, so he flinches a little when Ronan climbs back into bed. Ronan’s hands are cold and slightly damp, but their touch is soothing on Adam’s back. He doesn’t know if Ronan is saying anything, but he relaxes and starts to slip back into sleep now that there’s a warm body beside him again.

The next time Adam wakes, he’s alone again and the sheets are cold and the light coming in from the window is bright through the blinds. Adam rolls onto his back and tilts his head up so he can hear the muffled sound of activity in the living room. There’s coffee on and he thinks he can smell bacon. His stomach gurgles and he ignores it. 

The plaster of Ronan’s ceiling forms a shape that looks a lot like a dick and balls if he unfocuses his eyes a bit, and it transforms into vulva if he unfocuses them even more. He wonders if it’s just the flecks on the plaster blurring into familiar shapes or if he’s actually starting to become obsessed with sex because it’s been over half a year since he’s had any. Eight months, actually. 

Adam can’t even put an approximate date on the last time he took matters into his own hands. Masturbation has surpassed being enjoyable and is firmly planted in the “annoying chore” category in his mind, and that strikes him as very depressing if he thinks on it too hard. It’s also an annoying chore that wants to be done right _now_ , apparently.

He thinks of Ronan. He thinks of Tad. He thinks of Blue. He thinks of about a thousand different people he’s seen around in the last eight months he would gladly let into his pants if given enough time and opportunity. He’s very glad this is happening while he’s alone, because he’s not sure he’d be using his head properly if Ronan were still next to him. He thinks of Blue’s cousin Orla and Gansey’s sister Helen and that youngish history professor whose classes he keeps signing up for even though he doesn’t need any more history credits. He thinks of that professor’s wife, too, even though he’s only seen her once or twice and thought she kind of seemed like a bitch. Guiltily, he thinks of Gansey and Noah and Declan and, for a single fleeting, shameful moment of insanity, of Kavinsky.

Adam has to put off this chore until he gets home and he’s regained some sense.

He rolls over and fishes his cellphone out of the pocket of his sweatshirt from last night. It’s earlier than he thought. He gets out of bed and stretches until he feels his spine pop, and he helps himself to the top drawer of Ronan’s dresser, where he knows there’s a gallon-sized zip-lock bag with a toothbrush and toothpaste and deodorant that’s designated as his in it. 

 

He sees his Coke shirt underneath the bag. It’s shoved in as if hastily put away, the faded red stark against the black and gray shirts under it. Adam wonders why it’s in such a state when it’s not even remotely close to anything Ronan would ever wear, color aside, because it’s a different size than he’d ever buy for himself. Blue liked that he wore oversized shirts and liked wearing them around; he wonders if Ronan does, too, and that’s why the shirt appears to have been worn recently.

The thought of Ronan in his shirt piques Adam’s interest again. It makes him think of how much he enjoyed seeing Blue wearing his shirts. It makes him think of how he’d enjoy seeing Ronan in his shirts--they’d nearly fit him, but they’d be just a little short in the length and looser than nearly everything else he wears and Adam feels a pressing need to take care of his chore as soon as possible. 

The apartment on the other side of the door seems quiet and he’s definitely alone enough to…

He’s not about to jack off in Ronan’s room, let alone in his bed. He groans and mentally shakes himself, hitting his forehead with the heel of his palm as if to knock the thought out of his head before collecting the zip-lock and closing the drawer, leaving any stray thoughts of Ronan wearing his shirt with it safely out of sight.

In the kitchen, Blue is sitting on the counter and absently poking at bacon in a pan on the stove while she reads the international section of the newspaper. She glances up and smiles. She’s wearing one of Noah’s band shirts and what are probably a pair of basketball shorts that definitely aren’t hers but are of indeterminate ownership. “Morning. Gansey’s showering but go ahead, unless you wanna use the kitchen sink?”

Adam does not want to use the kitchen sink and he does not want to be in the bathroom while Gansey’s in the shower so long as his body is still aching and wanting like it is. He sets his bag on the shelf above the sink and runs the water to brush his teeth. Blue hops off the counter to pour orange juice into Gansey’s favorite cup and she leaves it on his desk for him, and Adam wonders if it’s routine for her to do so. He can see Noah outside on the fire escape with a cigarette and a mug, reading a thick beige paperback with the name Hegel on it in giant black letters. There’s a crow sitting on the railing next to him, pecking at a piece of toast on a napkin. He sets his cigarette aside and pets the bird’s head with a fingertip before he picks up his mug. Framed by the window pane, it’s peaceful and comfortable and picturesque. 

Adam spits into the sink, narrowly avoiding a cup full of silverware from last night. He rinses the toothbrush and puts it back in the bag. “Where’s Ronan?”

“He went to bring Matthew home before school,” Blue says around a piece of bacon. She frowns because it’s not cooked enough for her liking. “You know how it is.” She pushes his mug from last night, which is now clean, towards him. “You want some fakon?”

“Do I want some _what?_ ”

Before Blue can answer, Gansey comes out of the bathroom, wet-haired and bespectacled and wearing one of his old crew shirts and jogging pants. In a slightly sanitized way, because Gansey is not Adam’s type--does he even have a type at this point?--Adam feels a weird, sort of subdued pang of want at the sight of him so unpolished and real compared to how Gansey normally looks. Gansey is also smiling hugely at him, delighted as always to see Adam completely at home in his apartment.

“I thought I didn’t hear you leave,” he says, side stepping an empty pizza box and the collapsed tower of trash Ronan constructed last night. 

“It was late,” Adam says by way of explanation. They bump fists by way of greeting. “It’s a long walk home.”

“I was up, I would’ve given you a lift.”

“Or Ronan would have, if you asked,” Blue says. She smiles at Gansey and puts the paper aside to hug him. “Hi.”

“Hi,” he says back to her. They’re besotted and it’s nauseating how Blue takes his water-flecked glasses off his face to dry them on his shirt and puts them back on him. Adam feels like a third wheel even being in the same room as them. Gansey pokes uselessly at the bacon in the pan with the tongs Blue had been using for them. “Is this the fakon?”

“Just like you asked for,” Blue tells him. “Your latest bout of veganism has not gone forgotten, Dickie.”

Despite himself, Adam groans, realizing what Blue had meant “fake bacon” when she said “fakon” before. “Not again, Gansey. Stop trying to make the vegan thing happen, it’s not going to.”

“Okay, Regina,” Gansey says. Blue snorts and he ignores her. “I fully intend to commit to it this time. I’ve done more research and I’ve bought a bunch of supplements and I have a meal plan.”

“You did all those things last time. And that lasted, what?” Adam looks at Blue for help. “A month?”

“Less,” she says. “About three weeks, and most of the groceries went to waste because Ronan refused to touch any of it and you and Noah can’t cook for shit.” She’s making a horrible face that reflects how Adam feels about the waste--not just of the food itself, but of the money that bought it.

“I have an excuse for not being able to cook,” Noah says, climbing into the apartment through the window to the fire escape. “None of you ever went through the liquid diet phase I did.” He joins them in the kitchen to pour himself another cup of coffee. “It’s in your best interest to know that the pizza from last night was completely not vegan, by the way, Gansey. You’ll need to start getting it from that Aubergine place on Bleeker or the Mindful Spoon uptown.”

“Or the VegOut place on campus,” Blue suggests. She wrinkles her nose. “Those places are all so expensive, though.”

“And they attract yuppies,” Adam says, and Noah nods. Noah agrees because he too was once a yuppie who tried to go vegan, back before juicing and liquid diets became the fad diet he preferred. Adam lightly punches Gansey’s shoulder and gets a smile out of him. “You’ll fit right in if you can stick to it eventually. But you’ll have to start buying hemp polo shirts instead of cotton ones--wait, can you still wear Lacoste if you’re a vegan? The little alligator logo seems like it would be an issue.”

“I’m more concerned about my Vineyard Vines. The whale is definitely more controversial than the alligator.”

“Oh, god forbid,” Blue says, voice flat. “Not your Vineyard Vines. Whatever shall we do if you can’t wear your neon-pastel atrocities.”

“Party hard,” Noah says. “We’ll celebrate the collapse of the bourgeois stranglehold on your fashion sense.”

“And prepare the revolution against the new bourgeois hippie clothes you’ll have to start wearing instead,” Adam adds. He and Adam clink their mugs together in a toast. “Fuck Free People.”

Gansey groans and leans his head against Blue’s shoulder. “I feel very attacked right now.”

“And you just came out to have a good time?” Blue asks. Gansey groans again and Noah laughs as he gives him a pat on the back. “You walked into that one.”

At that moment, Ronan practically kicks the front door in and they all flinch, even Adam, to whom the bang isn’t quite as loud, and he looks as intimidating and imposing as ever even with a pink and orange box of donuts in his hands. His stubble is impressive considering he was mostly clean-shaven yesterday and he’s wearing a slouchy black beanie with the words “bad hair day” embroidered onto the front and an expression that could only be described as his ‘resting bitch face’. 

“Ironic,” Gansey says, referring to the hat.

Ronan sneers. “Don’t ruin it with your filthy hipster irony, Dick.”

He steps out of his sneakers near the door and brings the box into the kitchen, carrying it on his shoulder the same way Blue carries pizza boxes and puts it on the half-height wall between the fridge and Gansey’s desk. “Matthew asked to stop on the way, so I figured I’d pick up a dozen for us before class.”

Like the stereotypical college students they are, all five of them descend upon the box like carrion on a carcass. Ronan, a pickier eater than the rest of them, takes only a single jelly donut and leaves the remainder in the box to everyone else. Even with powdered sugar on his lips and the ironic beanie over his shaved head, he still looks like the kind of person people cross the street to avoid walking near. And, because Ronan Lynch is obscenely wealthy but completely without class, he speaks around a mouthful. It adds to his uncultured, crass look. “Y’know, Gans, I don’t think Dunkin Donuts is vegan.”

Gansey, even paused mid-bite and shower-damp and in his pajamas, looks sophisticated compared to Ronan. He looks at the piece of chocolate glazed donut in his hand, then at Blue, then at Adam and Noah, back at the donut, and at Ronan again. Then, he shrugs and eats it. Noah takes off his reading glasses to rub his palm over his face. Ronan, dissatisfied with the lack of reaction, scoffs and wanders off to sit out on the fire escape. Blue and Adam share a look. 

Adam raises his eyebrows, _That lasted long._

 _Are you surprised?_ says Blue’s answering dull look. She glances over her shoulder at the abandoned, still cooking fakon on the stove, then back at Adam. _Now we’re stuck with all the stupid vegan food._

“We can donate it so it doesn’t go to waste,” he whispers to her. She smiles and gives him a one-armed hug around the waist and he kisses the top of her head. Noah smiles at them around his strawberry frosted and takes Adam’s mug to top it off again for him, and he gives Adam a pat on the back as he passes. 

Gansey looks forlornly at the box of donuts and then at the fakon with a much sadder look than Blue did. “I do suck at this. Like, really, so much.” He looks back at Adam, earnest and chagrined but ultimately not at all surprised by himself. “I’m a little ashamed, actually.”

“Maybe you try too hard at first?” Adam offers. Blue, who is undoubtedly more informed on this topic than he is, nods. She winks at Adam, and he takes that as a sign to make his escape before he has to endure a lecture on the morals and ethics of veganism with Gansey and intercepts Noah to reclaim his mug before going out to the fire escape to sit with Ronan. 

It’s still cool out, brisk and clear and sunny the way only early spring is, but it feels incredibly good. It’s easily the first day of the year where, by midday, a jacket won’t be necessary. The fire escape is narrow with both of them standing on it and the metal grate is cold through Adam’s socks. Ronan is brushing powdered sugar off his hands and the crow from before is really interested in his efforts. He doesn’t swat it away.

“Does it hang around a lot?” Adam asks. The crow looks at him curiously and hops closer on the railing to investigate him. He makes no efforts to touch it even when Ronan strokes a finger down its back.

“Yeah. Her mom was roosting here last summer and she’s the only one that stuck around.”

“How do you know it’s a she?”

The crow hops over to Ronan and nips affectionately at his fingers. “We took her to a vet. She started acting funny a while back and Noah got worried.” He swats at the crow, making her lift off the railing and settle down a few inches away. She scoots closer and he does it again, and Adam realizes she’s playing. Ronan is pretending to be annoyed by it, but there’s a softness around the edges of his eyes that contradicts his scowl. “I didn’t want a giant-ass dead fucking pidgeon out here.”

“ _Kerah_ ,” the crow says.

“Yeah, yeah, you heard me.”

Adam drinks his coffee and watches them play with each other for another few minutes before the crow gets bored and flies off. The sun is just bright and warm enough for him to feel it on his scalp, but the breeze is biting enough to give him goosebumps. He doesn’t move any closer to Ronan, but he shifts his weight so they’re closer than they were. Ronan looks down at where their hips are just barely touching. Adam looks at Ronan’s face and tries to figure out what could possibly be going through his mind, but he gets distracted by the shadows cast by Ronan’s eyelashes on his cheeks. Ronan’s gaze flickers to Adam’s face, probably trying to figure out the same, and licks his lips. Adam’s stomach does something complicated and pleasant as Ronan looks away again. 

“No class today, yeah?”

“Yeah, just work later.”

“Still want a ride?”

“If you still wanna give me one.”

Ronan’s jaw clenches a little and he hits the railing with his knuckles a few times. “I have my seminar in today. I don’t get out of it until 1:30, I forgot about it last night.”

Adam finishes his coffee. “I can go with you. I can get some work done in the studio while I wait for you to get out and you can bring me right to work after.”

“Sure,” Ronan says. He knocks on the railing again, thoughtful. Adam turns so he can lean back on the railing to get the sun on his face a little to warm back up. He feels Ronan looking at him again, and several long, quiet moments pass where neither of them speak. Eventually, Ronan does. “Have you thought more about Easter? Matthew asked this morning. I think he wants to bring a friend if you do, since Declan is bringing whatshername and I’ll have you. Be bringing you. If you’re gonna come, I mean.”

Adam considers. He hadn’t really thought much about it yet since it’s still three weeks away, but he doesn’t want to be rude and wait until the last minute to decide. It’s not like he has plans, other than working and finishing his sculpture and finalizing his paperwork for the summer course he’s signing up for. “I’ll come.”

If Ronan is happy to hear this, it doesn’t show other than a slight upturn of the corner of his mouth. Adam nudges him with his elbow. 

“Will I have to go to church with you guys?”

“Why, are you afraid you’ll burst into flames upon entering?” Ronan asks. His smirk is fond and sharp and very attractive.

“I have loose ends to tie up before I do. You know, funeral arrangements and getting my suit dry-cleaned. Maybe a haircut.”

“Gotta look your best for the afterlife, huh?”

“I wanna make a good first impression when I meet my maker.”

“Who’s that?”

“Satan, obviously. Duh.”

Ronan barks out a laugh. “I forgot you were born in hell.”

Adam laughs, too, despite himself. “Yeah, well, we couldn’t all be so lucky to be born into an American pastoral dreamscape like you.” Ronan gives him a look that says he definitely should’ve been as lucky, but he doesn’t say it and never will. Adam privately agrees, but he’s hard-pressed to voice them. Ronan takes off the hat and looks at it for a long moment before putting it on Adam, who isn’t quite fast enough to stop him before it’s tugged down over his eyes. He grunts and slides it back until he can see. Ronan’s face does something a little strange, like he forgot he was trying to be a shit for a split second, and then he recovers and goes back to his usual glare.

“Your hair is a disaster, man. Hide that shit until you get it cut.”

Adam touches the embroidered letters with his fingertips. “Says the guy with no hair that ironically owns this hat. You are a hipster.”

“The next time someone calls me a hipster I’m going to ironically key their car.” 

“Ironic vandalism is still vandalism.”

“Vandalism is anarchy is anti-capitalist, I thought you would approve.” 

Adam laughs. “I always approve of anti-capitalist agendas.”

“I know.” Ronan is looking out over the slightly shorter buildings around them, at the roofs and the tops of some of the taller buildings on campus a few blocks away. The crow came back, but he doesn’t acknowledge her and she’s content to sun herself in their company. Adam lingers for a few more minutes before he goes to duck back inside to get dressed to go to campus, but Ronan stops him. “About last night. If you don’t want me to hang out with you when you’re working, I won’t.”

Ronan is thoughtful in a way that doesn’t seem thoughtful at all. It’s strange and confusing like everything about him, but it gives Adam pause--Ronan is more likely to just stop lingering while he’s at work at the garage than he is to ask, and that he’s saying anything about it now is more than unlike him. It’s considerate in a way that Adam doesn’t associate with Ronan. 

“I never said I didn’t want you to hang out. It just annoys Boyd when we’re there alone because he can’t keep an eye on us to make sure I’m actually working.” He hesitates for a second before adding, “He thinks we’re together. Like a thing.”

Ronan scowls. He’s slowly turning an uneven, blotchy red and is refusing to look in Adam’s direction. “Why?” he demands, and it’s not really a question.

Adam sets his jaw, stubborn. “He has eyes.”

“That’s not an explanation.”

“He’s not stupid,” Adam says. “He’s picking up on something we’re putting out there.” Ronan grunts, the red spreading up his neck and his scowl deepening. “He’s asked what’s going on and I don’t know what to tell him. Any suggestions?”

The crow flies off again. Ronan watches her go and doesn’t look away when she disappears into the distance. “Go get dressed, Parrish.”

The anger comes fast and searing and Adam very nearly can’t resist the urge to break the mug in his hand. He rips the hat off and shoves it at Ronan, who takes it automatically but doesn’t look at him. “The hell with you.” He climbs back inside, making it halfway across the apartment to Ronan’s room before he turns around to go back to the open window. Ronan still hasn’t turned around. Adam leans out so Ronan can hear him and says, with as much of the acid and frustration he can muster, “I’ll get to the garage later myself. Don’t bother coming by.”

Adam Parrish does not often resort to venom and intentionally causing pain, but he knows the minute the words leave his lips that he’s drawn more than a little blood. He can’t bring himself to be shocked at himself or apologetic for it, When he turns back around again, Blue and Gansey are staring at him, frozen in mid-conversation on the couch. Noah looks more pained than surprised but his gaze doesn’t linger on Adam before he looks at Ronan’s back through the window and sighs heavily. 

Adam glares at them all for a moment before retreating to Ronan’s room and slamming the door. Because he can and he’s feeling spiteful, he goes to the top drawer of Ronan’s dresser and pulls out his Coke shirt before he changes back into his clothes from yesterday. When he emerges, to more halted and hushed murmuring, he collects the bag of his things from where he left them on the shelf over the sink and deposits his mug there. It might chip when he drops it against the stainless steel basin, and the sound is mildly satisfying.

“Parrish,” Gansey says. He moves to get up. “Adam. What happened?”

“Nothing,” Adam replies, shimmering and furious. Gansey sits back down. He heads for the door, his shirt and his toiletries in hand, and he only pauses to get his shoes on and pick up his messenger bag. “What else is new.”

Blue’s voice, beseeching. “Adam, wait, talk to us.”

He doesn’t wait and he doesn’t talk to them. No one stops him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> HMU on [my Tumblr ](http://i-tire-of-wonders.tumblr.com)for more shenanigans and general fannish whinging.


	9. The One Where Ronan is Late

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan’s about to throw his phone across the room when it vibrates in his hand. When he looks at the screen, it’s a text from Blue that seems to be made up of nothing but angry emojis, a few broken hearts, and a smattering of the gay couple one and crying faces. 
> 
> Ronan throws his phone across the room. It bounces off the door and clatters to the floor, undamaged because of its Otterbox, and he’s furious for even owning a damage-proof case. He gets up and strips out of his clothes, probably tearing or stretching or otherwise damaging them and careless that he does, and changes into his gym clothes, possibly harming them, too. He shoves the clothes he’s just changed out of into a duffle bag from in his closet. He needs to punch something and Gansey asked him to leave the apartment out of it. Going to the gym to find a bag to beat on for a few hours should make him feel better while sating his need to punch something.

Ronan likes his junior seminar. It doesn’t require much from him and is ultimately rewarding intellectually and academically, and the fact that he’s allowed to record it and use his laptop to take notes make it an easy favorite after his studio requirements and his Classics elective. He hasn’t missed a single session this semester. Until today. Adam is mad at him and Ronan is mad at himself for making Adam mad at him.

He’s sulking in his room, has been for hours, when there’s a knock on the door and Gansey lets himself in without permission. Perfunctory, because he knows Gansey isn’t leaving whether or not Ronan cooperates, Ronan protests the intrusion by not moving and turning up the music on his expensive speakers. 

“What happened earlier? With Parrish?” Only Gansey would still manage to sound polite and conversational while shouting over screeching EDM. He asks it as if there could possibly be any confusion as to who or what he’s asking about. “You guys were doing so well with the not-fighting thing.”

“Get out of my room,” is the response Ronan feels is the most appropriate. 

Gansey responds by stepping over the threshold of the room, closing the door behind himself, and manually shutting off the Bluetooth speaker that had been pumping out the music. In the sudden quiet, Ronan sits up and seethes quietly at him, but Gansey looks unimpressed and unintimidated from long exposure to his friend’s reticience. He waits patiently at the foot of Ronan’s bed with his arms crossed and his back straight, a sentinel in his Sperrys and Rolex and other articles of clothing so preppy and quintessentially Gansey that their color barely even registers in Ronan’s awareness. He’s still wearing his glasses and sort of looks like a yuppie suburban dad ready to scold his child for delaying his tee-off time.

“I have all day,” he says after a few more silent moments. “Noah and Blue just left and I can put off going to the library indefinitely.” He fiddles with the band of his watch. “Don’t think I can’t.”

Ronan continues to seethe. He won’t allow himself to be moved or swayed by the tone that used to make him bend to Gansey’s every whim. “We fought. We always fight. Big fucking deal. No need to launch an inquisition.”

This is clearly not the response Gansey was looking for, and he frowns. “Parrish doesn’t get that upset with you anymore, Ronan. You must’ve done something to piss him off.”

“He didn’t get the answer he wanted from me, that’s all.”

“What was the question?”

“No.”

“What was the answer?”

Emphatic, Ronan repeats, “No.”

“Did he ask you to define what’s happening between you? What’s been happening?” Ronan grunts in response, irritated as always. “And you’re not ready to do that.” He rubs his thumb over his bottom lip, and the familiarity of the gesture manages to have a slightly soothing effect. Ronan tries to not follow the movement too closely. “Why?”

“Because.” Ronan flops backwards so he’s looking at the vaguely sexual patterns in the plaster on his ceiling. He doesn’t know why, only that he’s constantly fighting the urge to act on his confused, conflicted feelings and the desire to never, ever act on them. “I don’t know why. I don’t want to change things.”

Gansey sighs. It sounds like he’s exhaling all the air in the world from his lungs. “It’s been two years you’ve been doing this. I know he was with Blue for most of that, but he’s been single and waiting on you for months. He’s going to stop waiting on standby eventually, and you know you don’t want that.” Gansey leans forward and puts his hand around Ronan’s ankle, forcing him to make eye contact again. “A little bird told me our man Parrish has been talking to someone else.”

Ronan grimaces. “No matter what we say, we don’t actually have a monopoly on his social life.”

“Someone else,” Gansey repeats, emphatic. He’s still touching Ronan’s ankle. “Another guy. Who isn’t playing hard to get with him.”

“Other people can flirt with him all they want, it doesn’t mean--”

“The little bird says he is receptive to this other guy.”

Ronan sits up. Gansey releases his ankle and goes back to crossing his arms. “What the fuck does ‘receptive’ even mean? And who the fuck is this little bird?”

“My sources are confidential,” Gansey says. Which means it’s Noah or Gansey’s poli-sci major friend Henry. “‘Receptive’ means he’s not shutting this other guy down or pretending to not notice he’s being flirted with. Like he’s receptive to you.” Gansey is frowning now. “Your window of opportunity may be rapidly closing if you don’t make something happen soon, Ronan. You need to get your head out of your ass or give Adam a reason to not move on and start seeing someone else.”

Rationally, realistically, Ronan knows he can’t stop Adam from doing whatever it is Adam wants to do or has set his mind to. To try and stop him, if he’s allowing this other guy to flirt with him and isn’t shutting him down, is effectively useless, because a month or two ago Adam wouldn’t have entertained the prospect at all. It’s possible it’s already too late to repair the damage he’s done by not acting.

That thought is terrifying and Ronan does what he can to stop it dead in its tracks before he starts to spiral on it.

“You’ve been holding the torch for him for so long,” Gansey is saying. “Why haven’t you done something when you know it’s what you want?”

_Bíonn ciúin ciontach_ , he hears his father’s voice say. “Get out of my room.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Get out, Gansey.”

“Ronan--”

A little burst of anger escapes him, hot and bitter. “I won’t fucking ask again!”

Gansey isn’t moved by Ronan’s misdirected fury, but he is moved by the wound he inadvertently caused. He turns to open the door and leave. “I’ll be heading to the library in ten minutes. Don’t compromise our security deposit. I’m taking your car keys with me for safekeeping.”

Ronan stays upright until the door closes with a click and he hears Gansey retreat to the other side of the apartment. Then he flops backwards and takes out his phone, thinking he’ll text Adam to try and apologize, and there’s a series of texts from Noah from several hours ago.

_YOU IDIOT_ , the first message says, _KISS HIM BEFORE SOMEONE ELSE DOES_ , says the second. The third, which is longer and in less aggressive capitalization reads: _I have it on good faith that there’s a freshman who wants to climb him like a tree and my gut says Adam’s gonna let him if you don’t beat the kid to it first._

That answers the question of who the little bird chirping in Gansey’s ear is.

Ronan’s about to throw his phone across the room when it vibrates in his hand. When he looks at the screen, it’s a text from Blue that seems to be made up of nothing but angry emojis, a few broken hearts, and a smattering of the gay couple one and crying faces. 

Ronan throws his phone across the room. It bounces off the door and clatters to the floor, undamaged because of its Otterbox, and he’s furious for even owning a damage-proof case. He gets up and strips out of his clothes, probably tearing or stretching or otherwise damaging them and careless that he does, and changes into his gym clothes, possibly harming them, too. He shoves the clothes he’s just changed out of into a duffle bag from in his closet. He needs to punch something and Gansey asked him to leave the apartment out of it. Going to the gym to find a bag to beat on for a few hours should make him feel better while sating his need to punch something.

\---

Swan and Skov are at the gym when Ronan gets there. Part of him wonders if that means the rest of Kavinsky’s inner circle is skulking about, but he doubts it. He doesn’t see Skov anywhere but saw his car outside, and Swan’s in the boxing section. He goes into the locker room and puts his bag away. He leaves his gloves hung up for now and takes the tape he keeps on the shelf with him in his pocket--there was a time when he could do without, but his hands aren’t as calloused as they were anymore. He’s not sure if his father would be disappointed that he’s slightly out of practice, or if he’d just be glad that Ronan hasn’t forgotten how to make sure he doesn’t fuck up his hands and wrists.

Swan looks up when she sees him approaching. She distantly reminds him of Kavinsky even though they aren’t related couldn’t look less alike, but they have a similar sort of Eastern European look to them. Ronan knows it’s unkind to lump them together that way, but Ronan is not a kind person and doesn’t feel badly about doing it anyway. She has nearly a foot on Kavinsky height-wise and could easily drop-kick him if the desire to ever struck her, and her features are less severe than his, but that may be because she outweighs him and doesn’t have his mild aversion to eating.

“Look who it is,” she says. She comes around the canvas bag to lean against a support beam, her skin a little flushed and sweaty from her workout. “It’s been a while since I saw you here.”

“I’ve been busy.”

“For a slacker you always seem to be,” she says. She smiles, and it’s not entirely friendly and is so slight it’s hardly more than a momentary quirk of her lips. “How is that?”

He steps around her to shove the canvas bag and see how heavy it is. It’s lighter than he’d normally hang up, but a lot heavier than he would’ve guessed she’d use. He can feel her black eyes staring holes into his skull, and he knows she can maintain stubborn silence just as well as he can. He steadies the bag mid-sway and sits down on the floor to tape his knuckles and warm up. 

“Not all of us are getting ready to make our own fortunes,” he tells her. She scoffs. “I have no plans to make anything of myself after graduation. I’m not Declan.”

“How is the antichrist?” she asks.

“Antichrist-like.”

“Of course he is.”

Swan, for reasons beyond anyone’s comprehension, has the same aversion to Ronan’s older brother that Ronan himself has. He thinks they probably hooked up once and it went about as well as anything from the Lynch’s brand of American new money and Swan’s family’s brand of foreign money could, which is to say, quite poorly. 

She steps away from the beam and nudges him with her knee. “Come on, I feel like kicking someone’s ass and Skov won’t spar with me because he’s a pussy and won’t hit a girl.”

“And what makes you think I will?”

“Come on, really?” She’s smiling again. “I can tell you’re itching for a fight and I want to give you one. Don’t get chivalrous on me now, we both know you’re not that kind of guy.”

She’s goading him a little, but she’s not wrong. He’s not the kind of guy who would hit someone, anyone, man or woman or whatever else, who wasn’t literally asking for it like this, and he knows Swan can hold her own without him going easy on her. He saw her knock a quarterback flat on his ass without even staggering in platforms and a pointlessly short dress at one of K’s house parties. He’s seen her single handedly both start and finish a bar brawl with women from the field hockey team. Ronan would be less than surprised to find out if Swan is the product of some KGB selective breeding and training program, and he’s pretty sure she’s actually the Black Widow.

He gets up off the floor and follows her to a cleared section of floor and helps her move some mats around to create a sparring area. She does something with her braid to turn it into a bun so it doesn’t get in her way and strips out of her tank top down to her sports bra while she waits for him to finish warming up. Her six-pack is both admirable and intimidating, even to him. 

She walks to the other side of the mats and settles into her stance when he’s ready. Ronan sees Skov approach them, sweaty from whatever he was doing, and he sits against the wall a few yards away, well out of their established space and starts his cool-down. They all exchange a brief greeting before Ronan turns a razor-thin smile on Swan.

“Ladies first.”

“By all means,” she replies, returning his smirk before she makes the first move towards him. She’s a martial artist where Ronan’s brawling skill is based in boxing, and while he’s much stronger and has more reach she’s faster and uses her whole body. He quickly has to abandon his favored stance to compensate after she hooks one of her legs around his extended arm and flips them both onto the floor. She doesn’t leave him pinned for more time than it takes for her to untangle her body from his and helps him up once she’s back on her feet.

“This is why I don’t fight her,” Skov says. 

She laughs, once, and settles back into her starting stance. “I’m sure there’s no other reason.”

This time Ronan doesn’t let her take the first swing. She neatly deflects and counters it, using his momentum against him to make him stagger. When he regains his footing and goes after her again, she barely manages to step out of his range and bounces on the balls of her feet before kicking. He knocks her leg aside and makes her leave herself open to maintain balance and taps her side. She snarls and roundhouses him in retaliation.

It goes on like that for a while. Skov gets bored watching them because they’re too evenly matched after they move past testing each other’s ability and disappears to the showers. Swan manages to get Ronan on his back or pinned more than he gets her down, but he forces her out of their established boundaries and gets her off-balance more often than she can get him to do the same. Ronan is pleased that Swan’s as good a sparring partner as he’d expected, because having a moving target that’s actively looking to challenge and best him turns out to be much more satisfying than smacking the bag around for a few hours.

Her braid is loose again and it smacks against her face one too many times as she twists and she holds her hand up to signal a timeout to fix it again, but she quickly gives up and pushes some of the loose strands off her face. She’s flushed and shiny and Ronan suspects he doesn’t look much better. He can feel a trickle of sweat under what little hair he has and wipes uselessly at it with his forearm. His shirt is clinging to his back, and he has no idea how she could possibly be comfortable in that tight bra when she’s sweating like she is. 

“I’m done,” she says. She’s a little out of breath. “I need to cool down and shower before class.” He nods, a little too winded from being out of practice to say anything. She exhales deeply and smiles at him. “That was fun, Lynch. We should do this again.”

He gives her a little shove and she laughs, slapping his hand off her shoulder and leaving him on the mat.

When she’s gone and he’s alone again, he leans over to brace his hands on his knees. His muscles are sore and a little weak from being worked like that without being properly fed first, but this is a feeling he lives for. It feels like productivity, like energy well spent, like his frustration is a weight lifted from his aching shoulders. He decides he’ll take his cool down by jogging back to the apartment to shower there, so he goes to retrieve his bag from his locker and stashes the tape back in his locker. He figures enough time has passed that he could run by the garage to see Adam, maybe bring him food as a peace offering, and head home to give him space for the night. 

Swan catches up with him on his way out the door and wondering where he should go for Adam's dinner. She’s wet from the showers and in clean clothes. “Can I talk to you for a sec?”

He shrugs. “Sure, I guess.” 

“It’s about Proko.”

Prokopenko. Fuck. 

Ronan had avoided Swan for months after what happened that night--what is there to say to the girlfriend of the guy who OD’d and died next to you? It’s been over a year since it happened and Ronan never once went to see Proko in the hospital. He’s never asked Kavinsky about it and K never said anything, either. He wonders if K ever expressed regret to Swan over what happened. 

Ronan wonders if it’s too late to do say he’s sorry to her. _Bíonn ciúin ciontach_ , his father’s voice says, _The quiet are guilty._

“Proko’s mom keeps thinking every time his eyes move or his hand twitches that he’s going to wake up,” Swan says, as if reading Ronan’s thoughts. Ronan looks away from her. He didn’t know Prokopenko was still on life support by now, because last he heard, Proko was completely brain dead. He’d been oxygen-deprived for too long while they waited for the ambulance. Swan doesn’t look expectant when he does look at her again. She doesn’t look upset, either, or surprised by his lack of response. “I just thought you should know. K knows and hasn’t been to see him once, either. Seemed fair to keep you equally informed since you were there.”

“I am sorry,” he says. It’s what he’d want to hear, even so much time later, if he were in her position.

Her eyebrows arch, but her expression doesn’t change otherwise. “You flipped your shit and called for help when K wouldn’t.” She smiles again, this time with more warmth and sincerity. She doesn’t touch him because he’s gross. “You have nothing to be sorry for, Lynch. We’re cool.”

Ronan doesn’t know what to do with that. She’s already walking away before he can say anything, and her car is gone before he takes another step away from the gym. He’s felt guilty about that night for so long that he doesn’t know how to respond to Swan’s forgiveness. He’s not sure he could forgive one of the people who didn’t do more to help save someone he loved. 

He never quite manages the jog he’d had in mind and is too off-kilter by Swan's benediction to remember he'd wanted to bring Adam dinner. He feels shitty and confused and like he's screwed up somehow. His phone is also buzzing incessantly where he’d left it on the floor of his room with messages he hasn’t looked at yet. He picks it up and hopes at least one of them is from Adam, because even a passive-aggressive text after this morning would be better than nothing.

All of the messages are from Noah. It takes more than one read for the full implication to register in Ronan’s mind, but his knuckles go white around the phone each time he reads the messages through. 

_Before you hear it from someone else, Adam had an impromptu coffee date with that freshman today._  
_My source says it went really well._  
_Numbers were exchanged._  
_They made plans to do it again this week._  
_I’m so sorry Ronan._

Ronan realizes, a little belatedly, that he’s going to have to apologize to Noah and Gansey for forfeiting their entire security deposit.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm horrible! HMU on my Tumblr to express all your feelings, frustration, and general discontent with where this chapter ended while I work on the next one.


	10. The One With the Juniper Tree

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He feels torn between going to Monmouth, going home, and going to Tad’s townhouse. He sighs heavily and puts the key in the ignition, pulling through the parking lot towards the campus entrance that takes him towards his apartment on the far end of town. If he’s alone, he can’t hurt anyone and do something stupid. Really, that’s the smart thing to do. Adam really hates always doing the smart thing when he just really, for once in his life, wants to be young and stupid and do something that will hurt him or he’ll regret the next morning.
> 
> The thing is, he feels like he’s going to regret going back to his apartment tonight. 
> 
> The thing is, he doesn’t know which stupid thing he wishes he was on his way to do right now.

Adam only has his figure study class every other week, and this is the last time they’re meeting before spring break. Technically, the professor didn’t assign a midterm like she was supposed to, and is instead having them leave their sketchbooks with her over break and is having them complete a series of quick studies of a moving model until the class is over. She introduces the model to the class and plugs in her old boombox to play a Fleetwood Mac CD while they work, and it’s really no different than any of their other sessions.

Adam is kneading his eraser when he senses more than hears someone sit at the easel next to him. Fletcher smiles at him and starts unpacking his supplies, a little more efficiently than Adam did because he’s a fine arts student like Ronan and is more used to this environment than Adam is. He’s the only international student Adam’s ever had a class with and he has the same sort of Irish accent Ronan’s mother has, which means that Adam liked him right away beyond the fact that Fletcher is both friendly and introverted and is a good partner to have in this class.

“Hey. Big plans for your holiday?” Fletcher asks. He flips through his sketchbook, which is much fuller and more impressive than Adam’s, until he finds a clean page to work on.

“Not really, no,” Adam replies. He leans around his sketchbook to look at the model and then back at the paper to capture the curve of the model’s spine and head. “I was going to go somewhere with a friend but… I dunno, I think those plans are shot now.”

“Bad break, mate. Sorry.”

“Yeah. What about you?”

He can see Fletcher grin from the corner of his eye. “I’m moving out of my dorm and in with my boyfriend off campus.”

“Congrats. Are you excited?”

“Thanks. I am, yeah. He’s always so busy, so it’s going to be great to get to see him and the baby every day like that.”

Adam can’t begrudge Fletcher for being happy and being in a serious relationship. He won’t let himself. Fletcher is nice and is trying to apply for a green card so he doesn’t have to go back home to Ireland because he wants to stay with his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s infant son. Fletcher is younger than he is and is vastly more mature than him and Adam won’t let himself be jealous of him. He’s happy for Fletcher and his boyfriend and his boyfriend’s kid. He is. 

He’s trying to be.

“I hear you and Ronan are on the outs again,” Fletcher says quietly. He’s a fine arts major like Ronan, so even though they’re different years they have a few classes together. This is the only class he has with Adam, but they hit it off well enough to study together sometimes. This isn’t the first time Fletcher has known something because Adam and Ronan have separately disclosed something to him without knowing that the other has done the same when they’ve seen him. Normally, he’s fairly prudent about not letting either of them know he knows something the other said to him; if he’s bringing up Ronan now, Adam assumes Fletcher has a good reason to.

“It’s not the first time,” Adam mutters. “And it won’t be the last.”

He doesn’t hear Fletcher turn his page, but the next time Adam glances over Fletcher’s started fresh again. “It’s not gone on for so long before, has it? Two weeks is a long time to not speak to your boyfriend.”

Adam scoffs. “He's not my boyfriend.”

Fletcher scoffs back at him. “Could’ve fooled me. Doesn’t he have a drawer in your dresser and spend the night regularly?”

“We're just friends. It’s complicated.”

“Only when you’re not having sex.” 

Adam breaks his charcoal and swears. Other students, engrossed in their own conversations, look at him. Even the model and professor turn to eye him strangely. Fletcher hands Adam a piece of his own charcoal to use. Adam takes the charcoal and gets back to work, determined to not leave Fletcher’s comment unanswered. “We aren’t having sex. We never have.”

“Do you want it to?”

Adam hesitates for a moment before answering, because while he does want it to, he also sort of hates Ronan right now and doesn’t want to even see him, let alone sleep with him. If Ronan will ever get over himself, Adam’s not even sure he actually wants to sleep with him or if Adam’s just been a convenient outlet to test the waters of his sexuality with without ever crossing the line between ‘probably gay but questioning’ and ‘actually gay and acting on it’. Adam sighs. “It really is complicated.”

“You’re joking,” Fletcher says. “There’s a betting pool on you two in my seminar. I have money on this, Adam, you can’t just tell me it’s _complicated_.”

“There’s a what?” Adam’s brain jumps from shocked to outraged to embarrassed to baffled at break-neck speed. He’s still cycling between them when he chokes out, “You’re betting on us?”

“Favorably,” Fletcher says, a little primly. “If you two get together before the end of the term I’ll be two thousand dollars richer. I already have the money set aside for the baby’s savings.”

Adam scowls and scribbles over his sketch before turning to a new page. He draws in annoyed silence for almost an hour and Fletcher is content to leave things where they are. He goes through another two pages and gets only about half of what the model does down on the paper, but he’s happy with what he gets down, even though he has considerably less to show for the time spent than his classmates do. The professor stops the CD in the middle of “Rhiannon” and asks them to leave their sketchbooks at their easels when they pack up so she can grade them over the break. As everyone gets their things together and wanders out, she wishes everyone a good time, but when Adam and Fletcher leave together, she wishes them both luck. Fletcher thanks her and Adam almost forgets to, and he feels a little badly for it because he likes this professor.

They’re out of the building before either of them says anything, and Fletcher breaks the silence. “Well. For what it’s worth, I do hope you and Ronan work things out for Easter.” He smiles and puts his hands in his pockets. “Not because I have money riding on this, you know? I mean it. I wouldn’t have bet on you guys if I didn’t think it was good for you both.”

It’s almost sweet, in a weird and slightly invasive kind of way. He knows Fletcher means well, but it's a strange way of showing it. “Thanks, I guess.”

“It’s nothing, really,” Fletcher says. He starts to head off the opposite way on the sidewalk. “I’ll be around if you wanna hang out while everyone’s away, and we’re spending Easter at home if you don’t feel like being alone. If you and Ronan don’t work things out, I mean.”

Adam smiles at the offer. “Thanks. Good luck with your move.”

“Thanks.” With that, Fletcher is on his way. At the corner of the building his boyfriend, a pre-med senior, is waiting for him with a baby strapped to his chest in a bjorn. Fletcher trots over to them and kisses them both, and they are a perfect picture of a young and modern family. 

With distance between them and him, Adam can now admit that he actually is hopelessly envious of them. He has to walk away towards the annex building where his sculpture studio is before they notice him turning green as he watches them. 

The building is quiet, most of the students who spend time in this building are elsewhere taking exams or have already left campus for the next two weeks. It’s newer than many of the others on campus, but it’s also not as well-maintained because it’s more utilitarian and is treated as such. He takes the stairs down to the basement level where his space is. He locks himself in, fully intending to spend the rest of the day here, alone and undisturbed.

In a lot of ways, it feels like he’s at work at the garage when he’s here. It smells the same, he uses a lot of the same equipment and tools, he even has a spare set of coveralls from Boyd’s here; the nice thing is that he’s generally left to his own devices while he’s here and can listen to whatever music he wants to and doesn’t feel guilty or unproductive when his friends come around. He has everything arranged just so, exactly the way he likes it, and he never has to worry about anything being misplaced because someone else got their hands on his things. It’s peaceful, almost, and after so many years working in an actual garage, the smell of metal and fuel and the sound of drills are all borderline relaxing.

He drops his bag and art supply bin on a chair near the door, stripping out of his jacket and draping it over the back of the same chair. He fishes out his second-hand refurbished iPod, a second generation antique he can no longer update through legitimate means, and brings it to the salvaged stereo he has set up in one of his cabinets to plug it in and queue up a shuffle of his favorite artist. Knowing he’s likely alone in the building, certainly on this floor, means he can turn it up louder than he can normally get away with. The bass and the singer’s unusual voice fill the space, and it makes Adam exhale heavily. Now he can get to work.

When he started realizing he’d have to work around the completed pieces until they were all moved to the other suite, Adam had the forethought to color-code the pieces and lay out spaces for them to keep them from getting confused with the pieces he was still finishing. It’s helped him avoid disaster several times, especially now that the room is getting more and more crowded and it’s gotten harder to tell each piece apart. He puts his hands on one of the pieces that isn’t marked and pulls it towards the more open part of the room to continue working on it.

Adam has always been a little preoccupied with trees. They seemed like the only logical choice in subject matter when his professor first approached him with the suggestion that he create a piece to be installed on campus. He made smaller ones at first, ones no larger than a bottle of wine, as his concepts. There was the willow made out of twisted and tangled wires and beads he gave to Blue, the barren sequoia made of car parts that Ronan called dibs on, the slightly rusty die-cut sheet metal birch Gansey fell in love with, but the one Noah liked the most was the one he decided to scale up for his installation. That one was a combination of wire and sheet metal bent and crossed and welded together just so to almost, at first glance, look like a charcoal or pen sketch of a juniper. Of course, for the most part, the actual type of tree would largely be lost on almost everyone that ever looks at it, but Adam made a very conscious choice in the ones he’d made the models of and what materials he would use for each. 

There’s an old folk story about a juniper tree that he’s always liked. 

His tree is dominating half of the room, branches of it assembled in pieces sitting on moving dollies and castors, all waiting to be moved into the biggest suite at the other end of the building to be welded into shape and mounted to its concrete base and installed near the wooded footpath on the far end of campus near the old humanities building. He hadn’t been given a choice as to where it was going to be placed, but he thinks it’s very fitting that’s where his tree will be planted over the summer.

As he preps his blowtorch and pulls on his gloves and welding mask, he can hear his mother reading him the story about the juniper tree. He doesn’t remember her ever actually telling him the story, but he hears her voice so clearly in his mind that he’s sure she had to read it to him at least once. 

He hasn’t seen her or spoken to her in years. He wonders if she’s okay, if his father ever stopped drinking, if all the violence and anger in that house was all his fault and it vanished when he left, is his mother ever got the courage up to leave his father. He wonders if his mother ever bought another guitar. He wonders if his father has drowned in liquor or his own sick, if his liver failed and he died yellow with jaundice. He wonders if his mother has lung cancer from all the cigarettes she smoked, or if she’s already dead from them or his father’s misplaced hatred for his son. He doesn’t have any way of knowing if they are alive or not. 

Adam gives himself a mental shake to get his thoughts back to where they need to be. He forces his mother’s Appalachian drawl out of his head and replaces it with the lyrics of the song echoing in his workspace. When she threatens to come back into his thoughts, he hums along to the music. Eventually, he murmurs along the way he only does when he’s completely alone. 

It’s been a very long time since he had so many uninterrupted, isolated hours to work. It feels incredible to create like this, the barely contained frenetic vibration of visible progress and growth has him smiling under his mask. He’s proud. He’s enthused. He feels kinetic. He pauses to strip out of his flannel shirt and down to just his tee shirt after a while, tossing it away so it partially lands in his work sink because he can’t be bothered to go across the room to put it with the rest of his things. His music ebbs and flows, goes from mellow to simmering, dreamy to blistering, and he almost doesn’t even realize when it starts to repeat tracks.

His phone vibrates so hard in his pocket that he nearly smacks himself in the face with his torch. He pulls it out and realizes he’s been here for almost six hours when he sees the time. It’s well after dark now, and his friends are all wondering where he is. Or, rather, going by what some of his missed texts are telling him, they think they know where he is. 

_We’re all at Monmouth if you want to come by_ , Gansey’s text reads. The “come alone” goes unsaid, but Adam feels like it’s very heavily implied. 

It takes him a moment to decipher Blue’s first text because she used a pizza emoji next to one of stars and an assortment of ball emojis that came with her phone and one of a movie projector. Star-baseball or night-billiards doesn’t make any sense, but Spaceballs does, so he assumes that’s what they’re watching. Her next one, time stamped about an hour after the first, reads, _r u w tad? DONT B A FUCKBOY USE PROTECTION!!1!!!!_ , and it’s punctuated by a toothy smile and a mildly confusing eggplant. He realizes what the eggplant is implying and feels like she’s somehow threatening him, or at the very least is trying to unnerve him.

Noah’s text is strangely parental. _Hope you’re having fun--lunch tomorrow before I go to the airport at 1? Let me know._

_ugh save me from all this grading_ , Tad sent, along with a picture of a seriously intimidating pile of papers he must still be working on. _there’s not enough coffee in the world for this lbr_

The most recent text is from Ronan. It’s a single letter, either a capital ‘I’ or a lowercase ‘L’ and nothing else, so it probably means nothing beyond Ronan’s been drinking and didn’t mean to send Adam anything. Adam shakes his head and types out a few quick responses to the messages that warrant them, and he’s about to put it back in his pocket when it vibrates again. This time it’s a phone call rather than a text, and he answers it without looking at the screen, because he knows who it is before he picks up. He slides his rolling stool across the room to lower the volume of his music. 

“I’m not angry,” he says.

“Bullshit,” Ronan replies. “That’s my line.”

Adam closes his eyes and counts to ten. “Why’s that?”

“Because you bailed,” Ronan says. He’s not slurring, but his words are coming out a little softer around the edges than they normally would. “It’s movie night before spring break and you’re not here.”

Adam sighs and rolls over to the sink to retrieve his flannel shirt. “I didn’t think I was wanted.”

“Why wouldn’t I want you?”

Ronan is just out of it enough to not realize what he just said, and Adam latches onto it. “You tell me. I’ve been asking myself that question for eight months.”

“I don’t--Oh,” he trails off a little. “Are you busy?”

“I was.” Adam turns off his torch and balances his phone on his shoulder as he takes off his gloves. 

Ronan must hear the movement because he makes an unhappy sound. “What were you doing?” He sounds almost hesitant, like he doesn’t actually want to know what Adam was doing. Considering what impression he’s under, which Adam has made no moves to correct, he’s clearly assuming the worst. 

He lets Ronan assume the worst for another minute longer before he stops being petty and cruel. “I’m at my studio. I’ve been here all day working.”

“Oh. Oh, fuck.” Ronan sounds relieved. It makes Adam clench his jaw. “I thought--”

“I know what you thought.”

“So you weren’t with…?”

“No. I haven’t seen him. He had tests all day.” If Adam closes his eyes, he can see Ronan in his room. It’s so clear that he can imagine himself sitting there with Ronan, can smell his bedroom and his aftershave and the burn of liquor, can feel the hardwood floor. He sighs. “We have to talk about this.”

Ronan grunts.

“Eloquent,” Adam says. “I mean it. You’ve all got it all wrong about me and Tad. We’re just talking. I can have friends that aren’t you guys.”

Ronan grunts again. “Yeah, I know. But he’s not--you don’t even _like_ him. You used to complain about him staring at you when you saw him around. He’s barely legal and he’s all...twinky.”

Adam laughs so hard it startles him, and he can’t stop once he starts. He has to pull the phone away from his ear so he can try and get himself under control, because every time Ronan tries speaking it just sets Adam off again. When he has his giggles down to a minimum, he puts the phone back up to his ear. For a moment he thinks Ronan’s hung up on him. .

“Are you fucking done?” Ronan asks. He sounds pissed and a little more sober, but it’s just as likely that he’s so annoyed his slur is just gone.

Adam swallows another bubble of laughter. “I’m done.”

“That wasn’t even funny, Adam, like what the fuck?”

“It’s just---you never, like, use the words.”

“What words?”

“Gay words.”

“What gay word did I use?”

Adam laughs again, “You called Tad a twink.”

“Yeah, well.” Ronan huffs, indignant. “It’s true.”

“It is, you’re right.” He sighs and stands up, balancing the phone on his shoulder so he can pull his flannel back on. Ronan is quiet on the other end. Adam puts the phone on speaker and tucks it into one of his shirt pockets so he can move the piece of his tree he was working on to where it needs to be now that it’s finished. He knows Ronan can hear the movement and must be relieved to know it’s the truth that Adam’s been at his studio all day, but Adam also doesn’t feel like he owes Ronan that truth right now.

After the better part of a day spent in isolation, after two weeks of Ronan not speaking to him and even though Adam is still pissed off at him, it feels incredibly good to hear his voice and talk to him like things are almost normal. Almost. 

“It’s late,” Adam says after several long minutes of silence and he’s done cleaning up. “I’m starving, I haven’t eaten.”

“There’s lots of food here,” Ronan offers. 

“I’m tired, too,” Adam says, turning down the invitation without saying ‘no’ outright. As nice as this is, he’s not in a mood to see Ronan tonight, especially if Ronan’s had enough to drink to loosen his tongue like this. They need to talk, and while the liquor might help make Ronan more amenable to talking about his feelings now that his tolerance is shot from so many months nearly completely sober, Adam doesn’t want him tipsy when they do finally sit down and have their long overdue heart to heart. “I’m going to see Noah for lunch tomorrow before him and Gansey go to the airport. I can come by after if you want.”

“Sure,” Ronan says. “You don’t have plans to see whatshisname before he flits back to wherever he came from?”

“I’ll come by whenever I’m done with Noah.” He ignores the question about Tad completely. “I’m gonna lock up here and go crash until morning. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Ronan sighs heavily. “Yeah, see you.”

Adam hangs up and stares at his phone for a minute. There’s another text that came in while he was talking to Ronan, but he lets it sit for another few minutes while he finds a few more excuses to putter around his workspace, as if he won’t be spending the better part of spring break in here. He unplugs his mostly dead iPod from the stereo and puts it away in his bag. The sudden quiet is heavy. It makes him anxious because he knows he’s completely alone in the building and campus is already considerably less populated than it was a few hours ago when the last midterms ended. 

He checks the text and taps the phone icon to dial out as he pulls on his jacket. It forwards him to a weird, slightly dated ringback tone, and then it cuts out when Tad picks up.

“Hey,” Adam says. “I know a place that’s still serving if you still want a coffee.”

“Are you questioning my constant need for coffee?” Tad asks. “I always want coffee. But I’m back at my place and have a pot going already, so if you want you can come over and have some with me?” He sounds hopeful, a little hesitant, not half as brazen as he usually is. “I mean, my roommates are partying in some other townhouse and I’m alone here if that’s what you’re worried about.”

Adam doesn’t want to admit it, but he’s actually a little disappointed that Tad’s home for the night. He’s not prepared to go and be alone with him anywhere private, especially when he doesn’t want to inadvertently add fuel to the fire of campus gossip. “I have to pass. I was going to bring you one if you were still on campus before I headed home.”

“Aw, that’s nice of you.” Tad says. He sounds genuinely touched. “Can I get a rain check? I’ll make it up to you over break.”

Adam frowns as he picks up his bag and slings it over his shoulder. He can leave his art supplies and portfolio here for the night. “How? Aren’t you going home?”

“Nope. I’m staying here.” He clears his throat. “I, um, I’m sick. My parents thought it was better if I didn’t travel like this.”

“That sucks. What’s wrong?” 

Tad makes a kind of strange, noncommittal sound into the phone as Adam turns off the lights and locks up his suite. “Stomach ache? Yeah, a stomach ache. I’ll be fine, it’s just ruining my travel plans. Thanks for the concern, though.”

They make more small talk as Adam walks across the dark campus to the parking lot where his car is parked. It’s one of a bare handful left, and it looks only slightly less ridiculous than it usually does when it’s not surrounded by other cars. Tad asks him once more if he’d like to come over for that coffee and a little company and Adam refuses again, but promises they’ll get together soon. They hang up and he’s alone in his shitty car, with no obligations to be anywhere and no one to see.

He feels torn between going to Monmouth, going home, and going to Tad’s townhouse. He sighs heavily and puts the key in the ignition, pulling through the parking lot towards the campus entrance that takes him towards his apartment on the far end of town. If he’s alone, he can’t hurt anyone and do something stupid. Really, that’s the smart thing to do. Adam really hates always doing the smart thing when he just really, for once in his life, wants to be young and stupid and do something that will hurt him or he’ll regret the next morning.

The thing is, he feels like he’s going to regret going back to his apartment tonight. 

The thing is, he doesn’t know which stupid thing he wishes he was on his way to do right now.


	11. The One Where Adam Gets Takeout

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “They’re in love. Or some shit. It’s not that weird.” Ronan is very determinedly not looking at anything but the TV and the takeout container in his hand. “It’s not half as weird as whatever it is Gansey and Noah get up to with Sargent.”
> 
> “I know the wouldn’t all healed over and all, but please don’t go there,” Adam says. Ronan shrugs, as if to say ‘you know I’m right’. 
> 
> They eat in silence long enough for Jeff Goldblum to get drunk in the lab. Ronan gets up to get a beer from the fridge and comes back, but he doesn’t open it right away. He catches Adam looking at him and he sneers.
> 
> “Take a picture, Parrish.”
> 
> “Why bother wasting the film?”
> 
> “Whatever, I’m hot as fuck and that picture would be excellent. Fuck you.”

"What," Ronan says, "In God's name, am I fucking looking at?"

"The obvious answer seems too obvious," Adam replies. He reaches into the bin to pull out a piece of the scrap metal inside and is personally offended by what he's holding. "I can't use this."

"It doesn't seem like your usual medium, no."

“Well. At least this is an art school, I’m sure someone will have a use for--”

“What appear to be four hundred steel dildo molds?” Ronan asks. He picks up another piece of the scrap and drops it almost instantly because it’s shaped an awful lot like someone’s forearm and fist. He looks horrified and wipes his hand on his shirt as if it sullied him somehow. Adam picks up one of the other molds on top of the bin. It’s relatively normal looking as far as dicks or sex toys go, at least as far as Adam can tell, which compared to the majority of what’s in the bin means it's small and cylindrical with no other distinguishing features. Ronan's lip is curling with disdain over the arm-shaped one. “Yeah. I’m sure there’s some other weird sculpture major that would be all over these things so they can create their… Fuck if I know.”

“ _Seminal_ artwork?”

Ronan groans and drops the mold he's holding back into the bin. “That was awful. Like really awful. I’m ashamed to have heard that with my own two human ears.”

Adam gives him a light shove. "You should be ashamed of the music you listen to, not my low-ball dick puns.”

Ronan groans again, and it pitches up into a shout. Adam laughs and has to lean against the side of the bin for support. Ronan throws his hands up in the air and turns on his heel. “That’s it, I’m out, you deal with your dicks on your own.” 

Adam stops laughing and grabs Ronan’s elbow as he starts to walk away. “Okay, okay, I’m done, I promise. No more dick puns.”

“You say that now.” Ronan pulls his arm out of Adam’s grip and points at him. “You’ll come up with one more that’s even worse than the rest and hold onto it until you’re ready to lay it on me when I’ve forgotten about this.”

Adam nods, because Ronan is absolutely right. He’s glad that they can be standing next to a crate full of dicks, having this conversation over all others, and have it not be awkward. He puts the small mold in his hand back in with the rest and wonders how he missed that one of them looks a lot like a garden gnome, and then is very deeply concerned as to why a mold like that exists in the first place for the specific purpose that the scrap metal in the crate was used for. He must make a face, because Ronan follows his line of sight, spots the gnome, and goes a little green. 

“That’s just fucking wrong,” he says. 

“That’s an accurate way of putting it,” Adam says. They exchange a look and they put the lid back on the crate. Ronan hops up onto it to watch Adam tidy up without offering to help. He doesn’t offer because he’s an asshole, but Adam doesn’t begrudge him for it because he knows better than to expect Ronan Lynch to not be an asshole. While Ronan does nothing but casually observe, Adam moves some of his carts around the room to where they belong and labels the completed pieces that still need to be marked.

“So how are you putting it together?” Ronan asks after a few minutes. 

Adam doesn’t stop moving things around as he answers. “With a migraine I can already feel coming on, and it’s still three weeks away.” He pushes his hair off his forehead again and feels it sticking up, but he doesn’t bother trying to smooth it back down. He really does need a haircut. And a shower. Not necessarily in that order. He goes to his work sink and washes his hands, but metallic smell clings to them under the powdery-rosey scent of the generic soap the school provides him with. The combination’s a little nauseating, but if Adam wasn’t also going on too much caffeine and nothing to eat he’d probably not be so bothered by it. His stomach gurgles, but he can't tell if it's nausea or hunger anymore.

“Hungry?” Ronan asks.

“Starving,” Adam replies. “Famished.” He picks goes through the process of unplugging things and making sure his cabinets and bins are properly sealed because he’ll be away for at least the next three days. “Ravenous.” He collects his bag and the hoodie he’d worn to the studio this morning, and then ushers Ronan out the door so he can turn off the lights and lock up. “And about eighteen other synonyms for hungry.”

Ronan makes a thoughtful sound. “Are there that many ways of saying that?”

“No idea, but I’m pretty sure I’m not thinking clearly because my blood sugar plummeted, like, sometime yesterday.”

“Jesus Christ, Parrish.” Ronan has produced sunglasses from somewhere on his person and is cleaning the lenses on his shirt as they navigate out of the sculpting annex. “When was the last time you ate? Like real food, not those stale granola bars you keep in the studio.” When Adam doesn’t answer right away, Ronan scoffs. “If you have to think about it, it’s been too long. Come on, I still have Thai from movie night you never ate.”

Adam’s stomach growls again, but he shakes his head. “I’m supposed to be somewhere, I’ll come by and have it later.”

They’re outside now and Ronan’s wearing his sunglasses, but he can still tell that Ronan wants to ask where Adam is supposed to be. To spare them both of any angst over where Adam is supposed to be headed and with whom he’s going to be, he tells the truth. “I’m bringing lunch to Fletcher and his boyfriend while they move him in. They asked so I can help them keep momentum or something.”

Ronan nods. “They’re on a tight schedule because of the kid, right?”

“That’s what Fletcher said, yeah.” He checks the time on his phone and sees that he has a little more time than he thought he did. “You could come with, I’m sure they wouldn’t mind.”

“Nah, I don’t need to be around a screaming infant while I’m hungover.”

“Are you?”

Ronan rolls his eyes. “No, but that’s what you’re gonna tell them when it comes up that you were with me before you headed over.”

If it even comes up, because Adam’s never been around a baby before and the mere thought of it already has his stomach in knots that nearly eclipse the hunger pangs, and he’s not planning on sticking around longer than he absolutely has to. 

“It won’t take long, I’ll be at Monmouth in, like, an hour and a half, tops,” Adam says as they approach his car. “You want a lift to the other lot?”

“I’m not getting in this shitbox,” Ronan says, which means he doesn’t mind walking. He kicks at one of the car’s tires and walks around it in the direction he’s heading in. “Make an Irish joke at Fletcher’s expense for me.”

Adam sighs as he climbs into his car. “Yeah, okay.”

He watches Ronan walk across the parking lot for a long moment. It’s only been three days since they patched things up, and that they don’t have their usual circle of friends to fall back on has left things tense and strained and more than a little difficult. Today and the disaster of the scrap metal they picked up from the Craigslist ad Blue pointed Adam towards is the first time things have felt really, truly normal between him and Ronan in weeks. It’s actually good to have some time apart while things are so tenuous, to keep things from getting bad all over again before they make the eight hour drive to Singer’s Falls this. 

Adam starts his car and wishes it could make the trip, so he’d have his own car to drive off in if things fall apart on Easter. He’d be able to avoid a potentially uncomfortable day long drive, too, and avoid having to listen to Ronan’s shitty EDM. When he thinks about it like that, it makes him scowl at the clock in his dashboard for a moment when he pulls up to a four-way intersection.

Adam memorized the order he’s supposed to be getting this morning when he got the text, but he checks his phone when he gets out of the car anyway to be sure. There’s a line of people placing and picking up orders at the island inside, and he’s glad that he has the extra bit of time to wait to be taken care of. This isn’t a place he’s ever eaten at, but he hears they make incredible breakfast food and have bottomless coffee all day long, which is enough to pique his interest when his stomach is so empty, but the place is narrow and the high ceiling traps all the noise and is nearly completely deafening to him. When the girl at the counter manages to take his order, he has to have her repeat it to him twice before she realizes he can’t hear her. 

She’s nice about it. A lot of people aren’t. She shows him her notebook so he can see that she has the order right before punching it into the computer and telling him it’ll be twenty minutes.

When he turns around to find a corner to wait in, he sees Tad sitting at one of the booths with an iPad and a bowl. He happens to glance up and meets Adam’s eye, and Adam remembers that Tad had said he was staying in town because he was too sick to travel. He’s pale and the circles under his eyes could rival Ronan’s or Adam’s own, but he smiles and waves Adam over to join him.

“I’ve got room for company if you’re staying,” he says. He looks even worse up close, skin shiny and broken out. He pushes the chair across from him out, and Adam sits down when he knows he shouldn’t. 

“I’m just waiting for a takeout order,” Adam tells him. Tad seems disappointed that they can’t have lunch together. “How are you feeling? You look--well, not good.”

“I look like old shit,” Tad says. He pushes his hair out of his face and tries to tuck it behind his ear, but it doesn’t stay. Adam’s fingers itch, muscle memory, to fix it the way he used to or Blue’s. Tad’s hair looks silky and fine, unlike hers and Ronan’s, if Gansey and Matthew are to be believed. He clenches his hands under the table. Tad leans back and puts one hand over his stomach. “I’m glad I don’t have to fly back to Seattle like this, though. This is the first time I’ve been out of the house in days.” He nudges Adam’s shin with the toe of his shoe. “Don’t worry, I’m not contagious. My body is just trying to shred itself into pieces, shark week and all.”

Adam isn’t sure he heard Tad right and leans closer. “Sorry, what?”

“Shark week,” Tad says. “I have my period.”

“Oh.” Adam’s brain takes a moment to compute that before it sinks in. He sits back in his chair. “ _Oh_.” 

Tad nods encouragingly and points at him with finger guns. “Bingo.”

Adam takes another moment to reconcile the person sitting across from him with his basic understanding of anatomy doing something completely normal but incongruous with everything he thought he understood about the reality of Tad Carruthers. Very carefully, he asks, “ Is that… normal?”

Tad wrinkles his nose, but Adam can’t tell if it’s because of a lack of tact on Adam’s part or just displeasure with the topic on the whole. “Unfortunately, yes.” Something bitter flickers in his expression under the pained resignation, but he smiles with false cheer. “Useless fucking organs, am I right?”

Adam feels the same way about his heart sometimes. Sometimes that doesn’t seem like it would be such a bad thing to be rid of it, but unfortunately, that would kill him. The worst Tad would suffer from being free of his useless organs would be… Adam’s not sure what it would be, aside from clearly preferable as far as Tad's concerned.

Tad is watching him warily, trying to parse out how Adam is handling this revelation. “I can spell it out for you if you want, like, I can make it plainer if you need me to.”

“No, no, it’s okay. I get it.”

“Is it a problem?” 

Adam takes a moment to consider, and he realizes that his under-reaction is because, frankly, he doesn’t care enough for it to. Tad is still Tad, Tad still has a crush on him, and he realizes that he would still entertain the thought of sleeping with Tad if the opportunity presented itself. What that says about him, he doesn’t know, but he suspects he may be operating on a slightly different level of bisexual than he previously thought he did. 

“No, it’s not a problem,” he says. Tad’s eyebrows shoot up. “It’s still a surprise, though.” 

“I would hope, but I don’t always…” Tad trails off a little and makes a vague gesture. “Pass well, like as a guy. I apparently come across as kind of a butch lesbian or androgynous or something to some people. It bites.”

“That’s weird,” Adam says. “You don’t--I mean, I never thought that you weren’t…” He doesn’t know what sort of words to use, so he stops before he says something inadvertently offensive. He’s never been more thankful to not suffer from chronic foot-in-mouth like Gansey. Adam doesn’t know what to say anymore, so he says nothing. 

Tad looks at the table, chagrined, and fiddles with the spoon sticking out of his empty bowl. “Did I just make this really, really weird for you? Like are you having a sexuality crisis right in front of me? Am I making it worse talking about it? I can act all macho if it'll help you reconcile this new information any.”

Adam scoffs. “I’m fine. I just don’t really have the vocabulary to say much about it, I don’t want to sound like an ass.”

“If I expected people to not sound like asses when they find out about me, I’d never talk to anyone about it at all, and that would suck because I like talking to people and I’d die an old maid.” He frowns. “Or, like, what’s the equivalent of an old maid for guys?”

“There isn’t one, I don’t think. I’d be on my way to being one if there was.”

“That’s dumb,” Tad says. “Have you seen you? How are you possibly on your way to being a--an old butler? That was stupid, pretend I didn’t just call you an old butler." He purses his lips. "But seriously, how have you not dated anyone since you and whatshername broke up?”

Before Adam can answer, someone taps him on his shoulder. It’s the girl from the counter, and she’s handing him a big paper bag with the receipt for his order stapled to it. She smiles. “I figured this was better than trying to yell for you. That’s eighteen even.”

Adam hands her the twenty Fletcher gave him and tells her to keep the change. He can spare the two dollars of change for Fletcher from his own money, because this girl has been really nice and deserves the tip. She grins and glances at Tad before walking away from the table. Tad is watching her walk away when Adam turns back to him.

“She overheard me asking about your ex,” Tad tells him. “I will bet you almost anything that if you ever come here on one of her shifts again that she’ll slip you her number.”

Adam frowns and turns to look at the girl again, but she has her back turned. He frowns at Tad. “No way. She’s just good at her job.”

Tad looks at him like he can’t believe Adam is so blind. “That’s what I would do. Hell, I’ve _done_ that, and for guys that weren’t half as attractive as you.”

“You already have my phone number, Tad,” Adam says as he stands up. “You don’t have to keep flattering me.”

“Sure I do. I haven’t gotten a date yet.”

“I told you it’s not like that.”

“I know, but a boy can dream.” He eyes the size of the bag in Adam’s hands and wrinkles his nose. “Any chance that’s all for you?”

“None of it’s for me.” He looks at his phone for the time and takes a step back. “I’m dropping it off somewhere.”

Tad seems like he doesn’t completely believe that. “Don’t let me keep you from playing delivery boy. I’ll see you soon, yeah? And, um, thanks, for not freaking out or getting weird about…”

“Yeah, no problem.” Had he really been expecting Adam to freak out? Was that the normal reaction he got from guys he liked? Is it weird that Adam doesn’t think it’s weird? His brain continues to spiral along that line of thought, and he knows it won’t stop any time soon. “I’ll call you.”

Tad smiles. “Looking forward to it.”

Adam leaves before his less rational mind finds an excuse to stay any longer and gets him into trouble. 

\---

When he gets to the apartment building in town where Fletcher’s boyfriend, and now Fletcher himself, live, he’s glad that he manages to catch them in a flurry of activity. Fletcher seems too frazzled to attempt to recruit Adam’s help unpacking while the baby is screaming bloody murder. and he barely even seems to remember that he’d asked Adam to pick up their lunch and bring it over. He doesn’t ask after his change, either. Apparently, the baby won’t go down for a nap and was up all night, and the screeching infant is an excellent reason to not stay and be friendly. To be fair, the baby in Fletcher's arms chooses that exact moment to spit up all over him and completely derails any attempts to finally introduce his boyfriend to Adam properly, so Adam gladly hands off the bag of food and takes his leave as quickly as possible.

Fletcher is clearly a much stronger man than Adam is. Adam can’t fathom choosing to live in a place where something so small and so unbearably loud lives, and he also can’t fathom being twenty and volunteering to help parent someone else’s child, in a strange country, no matter how much he loved that person and their baby. He can barely imagine himself in the same room as a baby for longer than he was today, which was barely even five minutes.

He’s not convinced he’s equipped to be a parent at all, let alone a fit or capable one. He’s barely nurturing to the aloe plant Gansey’s mother gifted him last time he saw her, and he had to lie about the cactus from the time before being alive and well. when actually he managed to kill it and had to throw its desiccated little plant-corpse away. Taking care of something needier than a pet rock or a dust bunny is beyond him, and, honestly, that’s probably for the best because it’s not as though Adam has a healthy or stable frame of reference for parenting or familial love.

Spending a weekend, a religious holiday weekend, with Ronan at his mother’s house is horrifying and daunting, and frankly Adam’s not sure why he said he’d go in the first place. He can’t even remember why he didn’t turn the invitation down even after he and Ronan patched things up the other day, but he feels like that was a genuinely stupid idea on par with attempting to lecture Gansey on Welsh mythology or expecting Ronan to not abuse his twenty-five year old BMW by drag racing.

He’s never met Ronan’s mother, either, and by all accounts she’s going to easily be the most terrifying part of the entire weekend. More terrifying than Blue’s mother and aunties and cousins. More intimidating than Gansey’s parents and Helen. Easily more alien than Noah’s parents, foreign in every conceivable way, and his kid sisters. Adam knows Ronan’s brothers and only likes one of them, but he’s managed to get out of meeting Aurora Lynch for almost two years since she woke up from the coma. 

He’s been parked outside of Monmouth for almost ten minutes. Fortunately Ronan and Gansey and Noah’s apartment doesn’t face the parking lot, so Ronan has no way of knowing Adam’s here. Adam closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the steering wheel. 

He wonders what Tad’s parents are like, if they insisted he stay on the opposite side of the country just because he has his period for part of spring break. He wonders how they, or any parents, handle their child being transgender. He wonders what Fletcher’s parents must be like if their son, their only child, is so willing to immigrate to another country to start his own at such a young age. He wonders if he knows anyone who has shitty, unenviable, loathsome parents like his own.

A white Mitsubishi pulls into the parking lot and parks near Adam’s car. 

For a moment his heart stops beating and he’s nearly consumed by anger and hurt, but there’s no tacky knife painted on the side panel and the driver isn’t wearing ugly designer sunglasses and a gold chain. It’s just one of Ronan’s neighbors and her friend in an old Eclipse coupe, and they don’t even notice that he’s in his car when they get out and head inside.

He puts his head down again and grips the wheel with his shaking hands so tightly his knuckles go white, willfully dismantling the anger until it’s a mere burn of irritation and nerves that won’t hurt anyone but himself. Counting to ten doesn’t do anything to deaden the fury, but it gives him something to think about that isn’t Kavinsky and Ronan and lies and a broken promise and unanswered questions. He inhales on the even numbers and exhales on the odd ones until he’s counted to ten seven times, then reverses the pattern until he gets to ten for the tenth time. His hands are still shaking, but he doesn’t want to hit anything anymore, so he gets out of the car.

He wishes he could make an appointment with Dr. Poldma before he gets in the car with Ronan tomorrow, or that the support group meeting he finally decided to go to isn’t until after break is over.

_Everything is fine_ , he tells himself. _You don’t have a lot of embarrassing scrap in your studio you need to get rid of. You didn’t just find out the guy you kinda sorta want to sleep with out of spite menstruates. You didn’t see a baby throw up on a complete stranger. You didn’t nearly have an anxiety attack over meeting Ronan’s mother. You don’t miss your mother. You won’t get struck down the second you step into that church on Sunday morning. You didn’t nearly combust because you thought you saw Kavinsky’s car at Ronan’s building._

Adam is greeted by the smell of peanuts and Asian spices and coconut curry and the sound of Independence Day on the surround sound when he lets himself into the apartment. Ronan doesn’t move from his sprawl over the couch except to point at the kitchen with his chopsticks over the back of the couch. 

“Your container’s in the microwave, I didn’t reheat it,” he says, mouth full. 

“Thanks.” Adam drops his bag near the door and steps out of his shoes. “Did you take the lemon or leave it?”

“I took the one from Gansey’s, you’re good.” Ronan twists to look at him and a crease appears between his eyebrows. “You okay?”

“I’m fine. The baby gave me a headache, it was screaming the whole time I was there.” The volume of the movie gets noticeably lower. Adam laughs, just once, and rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands. “The kid’s a saint, I swear. That or he’s a genius and figured out an easy way to get his green card.”

Ronan frowns. “That’s cold, even for you, Parrish. Did the baby piss you off that bad?”

Adam stops the microwave to test if his food’s hot all the way through yet. It’s not, but he’s too hungry and is starting to shake a little and doesn’t want to wait any longer. He gets a fork out of one of the drawers and collapses into Gansey’s armchair. “I don’t get it. The family thing Fletcher’s doing. I keep thinking about it and it doesn’t make sense.”

“Sure it does,” Ronan says, as Will Smith starts yelling at an alien on the TV. “Welcome to Earf.”

“‘I could’ve been at a barbeque!’” Adam intones, with much less feeling than the TV, as he squeezes lemon over his pad thai. 

“It makes sense,” Ronan continues. “He wants to live with his boyfriend. That this guy knocked a girl up before he started dating Fletcher doesn’t matter. Fletcher’s weird, he was probably that kid that actually wanted to play house with girls in daycare, or whatever the fuck they have in Ireland. You remember how excited he was when his boyfriend got full custody?”

Adam shrugs. “I guess. But, like, I don’t get it. Sure they’re in love, but, like, that’s huge. The other day he was talking about adopting this baby so he has guardianship over it with the boyfriend. It’s like they’re married in their thirties.”

“They’re in love. Or some shit. It’s not that weird.” Ronan is very determinedly not looking at anything but the TV and the takeout container in his hand. “It’s not half as weird as whatever it is Gansey and Noah get up to with Sargent.”

“I know the wouldn’t all healed over and all, but please don’t go there,” Adam says. Ronan shrugs, as if to say ‘you know I’m right’. 

They eat in silence long enough for Jeff Goldblum to get drunk in the lab. Ronan gets up to get a beer from the fridge and comes back, but he doesn’t open it right away. He catches Adam looking at him and he sneers.

“Take a picture, Parrish.”

“Why bother wasting the film?”

“Whatever, I’m hot as fuck and that picture would be excellent. Fuck you.” He inhales deeply through his nose and exhales heavily. “Declan called. Before. He wanted to warn me that he proposed to whatshername and they’re telling Mom this weekend.”

“Oh.” Adam doesn’t know what to do with this information, because he hadn’t realized Declan was capable of committing to anyone but himself and law school, and he had no idea he’d been dating the same girl for long enough to get so serious. What’s the appropriate response for when the sibling no one likes does something good with their life? “Congratulations?”

Ronan makes a sound of glorious disdain and opens his beer. “Save the enthusiasm for the happy couple.”

Adam wonders if there’s more to the story than what Declan offered to tell, because Declan Lynch is an iceberg of a human being and deceptively shallow if taken at face value alone. “Are they happy?”

“How the fuck should I know?” Ronan asks. Adam shrugs, and Ronan groans. “Matthew says they are. My mom will never admit it, but she can’t stand this girl even though she makes Dec happy. I don’t talk to either of them, so I wouldn’t know. You’ll have to tell me.”

Adam raises his eyebrows. “I’m not a bellwether for joy or happy relationships, Lynch. I’m like a bad luck charm for that kind of stuff.”

“It’s your sunny disposition. You cast all that bad shit into stark relief.”

“Of course. How could I ever forget. Silly me.” The drunk pilot on the screen makes a noble sacrifice to destroy the shields protecting the giant UFO over Area 51. The son that he didn’t get along with is sad but proud. “Love is weird.”

Ronan takes a long, contemplative look into his beer bottle, as if it can refute Adam’s statement. “Tell me about it.”


	12. The One at the Barns

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I don’t think she’s gonna hurt me. I’m afraid she won’t like me.”
> 
> “Newsflash: you’re not as unlikeable as you think you are.”
> 
> Adam raises his eyebrows. “Yeah?”
> 
> “Yeah.”
> 
> “You sure about that? I’m kind of a dick.”
> 
> Ronan smirks. “Yeah, well, takes one to know one, right?”

It’s very, very weird to have Adam in his old bedroom.

He’s standing in the doorway, clutching the strap of his army surplus duffle bag like it’s the cord on a parachute, like a lifeline, and he’s got his eyes narrowed at the shelf above Ronan’s old dresser.

“You played tennis,” he says. 

Ronan drops his suitcase next to the bed. “You know I play tennis.”

“You never said you played for your school.” Adam nods at the shelf. He comes into the room to get a closer look at the contents of the shelf. “‘Saint Agnes Catholic School recognizes the athletic accomplishments of Ronan Niall Lynch for his qualification in the…” Adam trails off. “You went to a national tournament?”

The trophies on the shelf and the framed certificate above them make Ronan’s tennis career look much more impressive than it really was, but private schools like making their students feel very, very special all the time. Ronan lays back on his bed to look at the posters for bands he doesn’t like anymore stuck to his ceiling. “I qualified for a national tournament, but I didn’t make the cut after the rest of the region had their qualifiers. That thing’s a consolation prize.”

It was made out the year Ronan’s father died, dated only a handful of weeks before, and Adam definitely noticed after he brought it up. Adam takes one more look at the certificate before taking in the rest of the room. The instrument case leaning in the corner where Ronan left it years ago now, the Flogging Molly poster Matthew bought for Ronan with his first paycheck from his summer job at the gelato shop in town, old art supply boxes full of old art supplies, sketches and doodles pinned the the big corkboard next to his desk. The whitewashed paneling of the walls and the places where tape or thumb tacks exposed the natural color of the wood underneath the paint. The scuffed hardwood floor and the faded, hand-braided rug in the middle of everything. Adam’s mouth twitches into a smile when he notices the humidifier on the floor under one of the end tables, the books on mythology and Irish folklore and the ancient world on the shelf near the bed and the more standard children’s books on the bigger shelf next to the closet.

Ronan tries to imagine seeing Adam’s childhood bedroom and can’t. He doesn’t know what it would be like for him to see it, how it would feel to stand in the middle of it. He’s never been in a trailer to know how small it would have been compared to his own bedroom, aside from it being small and cramped.

It occurs to him that, other than knowing that Adam is also from Virginia, that he doesn’t know what part of Virginia Adam’s from. He’s flattened his accent so much it’s hard to tell, aside from being sort of ambiguously twangy and identifiably Southern, familiar only because Ronan grew up hearing similar ones when he wasn’t with his Irish-accented family.

“You can put your stuff anywhere,” Ronan tells him. “You’re bunking with me, so get cozy.”

Adam’s brow furrows, and Ronan wants to tell him to stop before he has wrinkles before he’s thirty. “Am I?”

“There’s a couch downstairs that’s older than fucking dirt if you want something lumpy and hard for the night.” He gestures towards the door, inviting Adam to suit himself with where he’s going to be sleeping for the next two days. 

It is incredibly, unerringly weird to see Adam at the Barns. It’s not that he somehow stands out here, because he doesn’t and it’s as if he’s made of the same stuff everything on the property is made of, like he grew from the far pastures or came out of the pond in the woods bordering the back nine acres of the property. It’s not even that he’s clearly uncomfortable with everything about this weekend, because no one else knows him well enough to be able to see that, and he won’t complain about it.

Ronan wonders if Adam will tell that freshman he’s been hanging around with about he doesn’t really want to be here. He’s afraid that Adam actually doesn’t want to be here. He’s afraid that Adam doesn’t want to be here because it’s Easter and he’s not religious, because he has work to be doing back at school, because he’s still mad at Ronan and is pretending he isn’t, because he’d rather be with Blue or with his new freshman hanger-on.

Ronan doesn’t even know the kid’s name. He doesn’t care to.

Adam drops his bag near the desk and leans against it. “I thought your walls would be blue, or gray, or something, and it’s bigger than I thought, too. When you said how old the house is, I thought for sure your room would be smaller than this, or the ceiling would be lower.”

“Dad put a lot of work into the upstairs to make sure we’d all fit. Converted the attic for him and mom, took out a bathroom and a closet to make a third bedroom to be Matthew’s. Raised the ceilings in here because the dormers made it really low.” 

“It is low in places,” Adam notes. He lifts his hand to knock on the slanted ceiling only a handful of inches above his head. “How often did you smack into it growing up?”

Ronan sniffs, indignant. “Never.”

“Which means all the time.” Adam is smiling, just a little, and it even reaches his eyes. Against the pale walls and the late afternoon sun coming in the windows, the blue of his irises burns and his skin looks darker, his hair a little blonder. Ronan can’t look at him or the gap between his chest and the neck of his shirt. “At least then you had all that hair to cushion the blow, huh?”

Ronan sits up and shoves Adam’s hip. “You say that like I went bald. You sound like Noah.”

Adam points at a picture on the wall. “What happened to that, then?” In the picture, Ronan is smiling at Matthew, not bothering to hide his braces in the candid shot, and he has a wild tangle of deep, nearly black curls that Matthew is weaving leaves into. Matthew is missing a tooth and is still round-faced with childhood, beaming at the camera, his own curls woven with wildflowers. 

“It was a pain in the ass. Hard to take care of. I got sick of it.” He eyes Adam’s pin-straight, ash-colored hair and can’t imagine it in curls. He can’t. He’s not prepared to handle what that might do to him if he thinks too hard on it while Adam’s looking at him. In this old house, with its thin walls, it’s possible to hear someone almost as clear as day, if they raise their voice enough. Ronan looks at the floor at the subtle raise in his mother’s voice. Adam probably can’t hear her, so Ronan nudges him to get his attention again. “Wanna help her with dinner? It sounds like Matthew and his friend are back from town.”

Adam’s brow furrows again, because he wants to say no and keep hiding up here where he at least feels a little bit of familiarity from being surrounded by Ronan’s things. Ronan doesn’t blame him. The Lynches might not be as numerous as the Sargents and their extractions or as loud as the Czernys, but they are a very different sort of breed than Adam is comfortable with. He doesn’t have to admit it in so many words for Ronan to sense his anxiety. 

“She’s been dying to meet you,” Ronan says. “She’s met everyone else.” She’s even met Kavinsky, but that was so long ago Ronan doesn’t expect her to ever recognize him if they cross paths again. He gets up and stands in front of Adam to hold his shoulders and force him to meet his eyes. “If you’re more scared of my mom than you were of Gansey’s parents, I’m going to have to question your sanity.”

“Such as it is,” Adam says with a thin, humorless smile directed at the space between Ronan’s eyebrows. “She’s scary for different reasons.”

“How so?”

Adam doesn’t answer right away. He looks at Ronan’s hand, still on his shoulder, at his face, at the open door over Ronan’s shoulder. He starts to fidget. He swallows thickly. He looks at a different picture on Ronan’s wall, this one of a much younger Aurora and Niall with a pair of brunette toddlers and a very bald infant at the park. “Your mom’s everything mine isn’t. I don’t know how I’m supposed to talk to her or be around her without making things weird.”

“That is the stupidest shit I’ve ever heard you say to me, bad dick puns from last week included.” Ronan shakes Adam a little. “She is not scary. She’s like a Disney princess brought to life. That’s why everyone loves her, okay? She’s Matthew with breasts and smile lines, and you like Matthew, right?” That makes Adam laugh and it feels like a triumph, because it’s the first time he’s smiled since they hit the state line into Virginia. “Chill the fuck out, Parrish, she won’t hurt you.”

One of Adam’s hands reaches out to touch Ronan, but he stops partway through the motion, so his hand hovers uncertainly between their chests. He presses his lips into a line and bumps the side of his fist gently against Ronan’s sternum. “I don’t think she’s gonna hurt me. I’m afraid she won’t like me.”

“Newsflash: you’re not as unlikeable as you think you are.”

Adam raises his eyebrows. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You sure about that? I’m kind of a dick.”

Ronan smirks. “Yeah, well, takes one to know one, right?”

Adam laughs again. Ronan realizes he’s had his hands on Adam’s shoulders for much longer than he needed to have them there, but Adam doesn’t seem to mind at all. He’s in no hurry to stop touching Ronan’s chest, either, and he seems to realize this at the exact same time Ronan does. They look each other in the eye, with Adam holding the eye contact for more than a single second. There’s a darker ring around the edges of his irises and a brown freckle on the right one that breaks up the gray-blue. Ronan’s never seen eyes like Adam’s before, and having them look directly at his own for once makes him swallow thickly and flexes his hands.

_What are we doing what are we doing what are we doing_

“Lynch.” Adam licks his lips. His fist opens and his fingertips are touching the shallow dip in Ronan’s chest. “Ronan.” 

_What are we doing what are we doing what are we doing_

“Yeah?” It takes him two tries to get it out. He wants to be embarrassed by how meek it comes out, how unsure and young and hopeful, but he’s not. He can’t stop looking at Adam’s lips. There’s a barely noticeable fuzz of stubble on his jaw that looks like it might be softer than his lips look.

_What are we doing what are we doing_

“Your door is open.”

It feels like standing at the edge of a cliff, being buffeted by the wind and barely able to resist the urge to take the plunge and let gravity do its work. 

_What are we doing what are we_

“That’s okay.”

_What are we_

“Okay.”

They lean in at the same.

Adam makes a sound, a little sigh that sounds like Ronan feels, in the second before they meet somewhere in the middle. It sounds like relief, like resolution, like benediction, like satisfaction. His lips are softer than they looked and his stubble’s a little rougher and Ronan feels his heart cave in on itself because he’s wanted to know what it would be like to kiss Adam Parrish for so long it feels like second nature to ache for it. Adam tastes like black coffee and wintermint gum and he smells like the BMW and warmth and he’s a better kisser than Ronan could’ve hoped he would be. Their bodies aren’t touching and then they are and it’s impossible to tell who closed the gap first, but Adam’s hands are holding Ronan’s shoulder blades and Ronan’s are in Adam’s hair and it’s soft and a little bit oily at his scalp and it feels so good on Ronan’s fingertips--

There’s a commotion on the stairs down the hall that startles them both so badly they both bite down on Ronan’s tongue at the same time. He swears and jerks back, nearly tripping over his suitcase and Adam folds in on himself like he’s trying to stop being six-one so he can disappear. Matthew appears at the bedroom door and looks between them. If he has any idea what just happened, he doesn’t show it.

_What were we doing what were we doing what were we fucking doing_

“Sorry, did I startle you?” Matthew asks. He’s out of breath and smiling. “Mom told me we could set up the goals out back if we wanted to play soccer for a while before dinner. You guys wanna play two on two with me and Tyler?”

Ronan looks at Adam. Adam looks at Ronan. They both want to say no, but for different reasons: Ronan because he can’t say no to Matthew no matter what else is happening in his life, and Adam because there’s only one thing he wants to be doing with Ronan right now and it is decidedly not playing soccer with Matthew and his friend.

“I’m really tired,” Adam says. “Being in the car all day.”

“Yeah,” Ronan says. Matthew is disappointed but he seems to understand. “Raincheck for tomorrow, okay, Matty?”

Matthew beams. “Sure thing. I don’t need help kicking Tyler’s ass anyway, he sucks.”

“Don’t fucking swear.” It comes out before Ronan can stop it, reflexive. It makes Adam snort, and the brittle electric feeling between them breaks. Matthew rolls his eyes and leaves as loudly as he came, but whatever came over Ronan and Adam doesn’t creep back in once they’re alone again. Adam pushes away from the desk and scratches his chin. 

“You look mangy like that,” Ronan tells him. “Going for that lumberjack look, Parrish?”

He scoffs. “I dunno, you seemed pretty into it a few minutes ago.”

“Creepy flesh colored beard isn’t a good look for anyone, you know.”

“No one’s perfect. We can’t all be tall, dark, and handsome like you.” He smiles and leaves Ronan alone in his room. Ronan doesn’t follow him downstairs right away. It feels like his old room is both familiar and not now, and he wonders what happens next. He feels like he should tell someone and tell them. Who is he even fucking kidding; he feels like he should call Gansey and tell him what just happened, but he also wants to hoard this feeling, this secret that unlike all the others he’s tucked away under his ribs can’t hurt him, like a treasure. 

He hears the murmur of Adam’s voice in the kitchen, and he hears the lilt of his mother greeting him. They go back and forth a little before Aurora laughs, whether at something Adam said or just because she’s happy Ronan can’t tell, but it makes him smile and go to join them.

***

They don’t kiss again and they don’t touch, and no one has any idea that they were, just upstairs, just a few hours ago. After spending all day in the car, they really are tired, but they don’t sit close or lean against each other they way they do at home. It goes unspoken between them that they have to act like they’re just friends around Ronan’s family because the reality is so much more complicated and hard to explain than Ronan wants it to be when he finally does tell his mother the truth, and Adam doesn’t push or contest this.

There are only so many times that their eyes meet across the dinner table or the living room that don’t feel charged by what’s come to pass between them today. More than once, Ronan’s been caught looking at Adam, and Adam’s much better at not getting caught looking back. 

Matthew and his friend disappear into the den sometime after dark to play video games for a few hours before bed, and the sound effects and their laughter and loud, teenaged conversation carries throughout the whole house. Ashley goes upstairs to bed first a few hours later after claiming to not be a morning person and wanting to get her eight hours of sleep before she has to be up to get ready for Mass in the morning. Declan looks like he wants to go with her and kisses her hand--her left hand, where her engagement ring is absent for Aurora’s benefit. Aurora watches them, a little wistful, and Ronan wonders if she’s thinking about her husband. 

It’s been six years since the accident, just over three since she woke up from the coma and found out her husband was dead, that Declan went to college up north and brought his brothers with him to mind them when she couldn’t, that Ronan tried to kill himself twice. She’s still a little frail and fragile looking, but the home nurse that minds her during the week says Aurora Lynch is stubborn as weeds and as resilient, that she’s stronger and more capable every single day. 

It’s very weird to see her and Adam in the same space together. She’s delighted by his manners and charmed by how out of his depth he is, and he’s tentative and trying very hard to make sense of her and how the Lynch family really functions, but he seems to genuinely like her. It might be because Aurora Lynch is compulsively likable, or because Adam’s starved for maternal influence and wants her to like him.

She does. She’s been sending approving looks Ronan’s way all day, whenever Declan isn’t sending disapproving ones at him because their mother has never, once since he started dating Ashley, looked at her that way.

By the time Ronan goes upstairs, Adam’s long since passed out on the air mattress on the floor, maintaining appearances and the appropriate level of distance between himself and Ronan. A friendly, not at all complicated platonic distance. The kind of distance that he and Adam keep closing and negotiating with each other and maybe, just maybe, finally bridged this afternoon.

Adam sleeps on his stomach. Sometimes, when he’s really exhausted, he snores a little, and he is right now, just a little rumble. Ronan’s stomach does something acrobatic and affectionate as he steps over him to get to his bed. He doesn’t fall asleep right away. He doesn’t remember falling asleep, except that a few hours later he hears the creak of the air mattress and sees Adam sit up. He reaches out to tap Adam’s shoulder.

“You okay?”

“Can’t sleep,” Adam says. He doesn’t sound groggy or croaky with sleep. “I’ve been awake for a while. What time is it?”

Ronan looks at the dim display on the digital clock on his nightstand. He groans. “It’s 2:15. We have to be up for Mass in less than three hours.”

“Jesus.” 

“Shut up, you’ve been up here for, like, six hours.”

“When did you come up?”

“Around midnight.” The house is silent and the bedroom is illuminated in moonlight and cast in deep shadow. Adam is looking up at him and he’s entirely shades of black and blue, and Ronan knows neither of them are going to fall back asleep. He sits on the edge of the bed. “You wanna go out?”

Adam frowns. The shadows aren't kind to the expression, making his face look like a tragedy mask. “Where? We’re in bumfuck nowhere.”

“We can go into town,” Ronan says. “Hit the diner, it's the only thing that'll be open. No point in staying here if we’re not going to sleep. We can be there and back and still have time before we have to get ready.”

Adam’s so quiet for so long that Ronan wonders if he fell asleep again, but then he nods and half-crawls, half-rolls off the partially deflated mattress.

“He’s beauty, he’s grace,” Ronan says. Adam leans over to punch his knee.

“He’s going to kick your ass for dragging him out of bed at this hour.”

“That didn’t rhyme and you’re already awake. You suck at this game.”

Adam’s grin is visible even in the dark. 

***

“I feel like calling this ‘town’ is generous,” Adam mutters to himself when they get out of the car at an all-night diner at ten of three in the morning. His hair’s barely tamed and his stubble’s more obvious and he’s still in his pajamas, like Ronan, but he borrowed a sweatshirt on their way out the door. He looks comfortable and masculine in a way that deeply speaks to Ronan’s queerness. On the overhead speakers, a song Ronan remembers was popular at middle school dances about kissing and being in someone’s arms plays, probably by choice of the townie girl making coffee behind the counter. She’s chewing gum that’s the color of a yellow highlighter, and she’s popping it almost in time with the song. She turns to greet them and tells them to sit anywhere. The place is busier than Ronan thought it would be, but the rest of the patrons are deeply stoned and giggling teenagers and truckers at the counter and a couple of cops in one of the corner booths.

They sit down at a smaller corner booth and leave a free table between them and a pair of truckers who might be asleep over their short stacks of pancakes.

“This place used to make the best corned beef hash,” Ronan tells Adam as they start to look at their menus. “They use real corned beef, not that canned shit.”

“Hey, I like that canned shit.” Adam doesn’t look up from the slightly sticky menu as he says it, but he does look up after with a warning in his eyes. “Resist that urge to make a poverty joke. I know it’s hard.”

Ronan nudges his knee with his own. “I wasn’t. I reserve those for mentions of canned vegetables.”

Adam shrugs. “Yeah, well, those never went to waste like real produce does.”

“Canned vegetables are not produce by any abstraction.”

“We didn’t all grow up on self-sustaining farms.”

“I take personal offense to the notion that you can can green beans and still call them green beans.”

“My point still stands. And you don’t even eat green vegetables.”

“I’m not having this discussion with you without coffee.”

The townie waitress appears with a coffee pot, mugs, and a disk of creamer cups like she was summoned. She pops her gum a few more times as she pours for them both and looks them over, but she doesn’t say anything to them. Her gaze lingers on Adam for a few moments longer than it did on Ronan, and he feels his jaw clench. Adam doesn’t seem to notice because he’s still looking at the menu when he thanks her. 

They take a few more minutes to decide what to order, enough time for the waitress to have already come by to top off their mugs without prompting. They order and settle back, their legs tangling together under the table.

“So, about earlier,” Ronan starts. “That happened.”

Adam raises his eyebrows at him and looks around at their fellow patrons. “Really? Here, now?”

Ronan shrugs. “Why not? I don’t live here anymore and you’re not from around here, who cares? It’s 2016, and some of those trophies you were ogling before were for boxing. We’ll be fine.”

Adam doesn’t look convinced. He sits forward and leans on his elbows, mirroring Ronan’s posture so they can talk quietly. 

“Yes, that happened.” He takes a sip of coffee and winces at how weak it is. “God, that won’t even do its job.”

“You’ve been spoiled by that hipster shit they serve on campus.” It is unreasonably weak, though, and Ronan is disappointed because it smelled strong when the waitress poured it. Adam might have the right idea by drinking it black, because the added creamer did nothing to make it taste any better. “Thoughts, comments, concerns about what happened?”

Adam takes another sip of coffee and makes the exact same face as the first time. “In no particular order: took us fucking long enough, never thought it would happen where it did, you’re gentler than I thought you would be, and it’s weird kissing someone who’s taller than me.”

Ronan smirks. “Is that all?”

“And, you know, a pretty steady stream of expletives and punctuation marks. Oh, and your facial hair. That was weird for me.”

Ronan was totally clean shaven the day before yesterday. That is very much not the case anymore, and his is much darker and thicker than Adam’s. He rubs his jaw. “At least I have it. That peach fuzz you have going is undignified.”

Adam shrugs. “It’s more dignified than that sad puberty beard thing Gansey gets. At least mine’s even.”

“I keep telling him it’ll really come in nice when his balls finally drop.”

“Gansey’s misfortune aside,” Adam says, “I only mean that I’ve never kissed someone who had facial hair before. It made me very, very aware that I was kissing a guy. Not in a bad way, just that that’s what was happening and that it’s new to me.”

So Adam hasn’t kissed the Freshman yet. That is very encouraging. Ronan doesn’t let it show that he’s glad to hear this. The waitress comes back with more coffee and their food, which makes them both stop talking for the few moments she’s at their table. She still hasn’t said anything to them, but Ronan can only guess she’s been here for so long her personality’s gone by the wayside or down the grease trap in the back. 

“So,” Adam says when she leaves. “What happens now?”

“We eat,” Ronan replies. He uses his knife to spread the whipped cream over his waffles evenly. “We go back to the Barns. You get in the bed with me like we do at home, and maybe we spend a few hours making out before we have to go back to pretending to just be friends for my mother all day.”

Adam spreads strawberry jelly onto his toast methodically, covering the entire triangle in a thin, even layer from the crust to the cut edge. “Is it going to be that simple?”

“Why not?”

“It’s just...we’ve never been simple,” Adam says. “It feels weird to think that just one kiss suddenly clarifies everything and makes things easy. I don’t know about you, but I’d gotten used to us being complicated.”

Ronan shrugs. It’s been too long since he had a waffle like this. He needs to get a waffle iron for Monmouth. “I guess. But it doesn’t have to stay that way because that’s how it’s been.”

“You don’t think that pretending we’re only friends, like totally normal friends, isn’t going to make things hard after this?”

_What are we what are we what are we_

Still complicated, because Ronan doesn’t know how else to be with Adam.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> (ﾉ ヮ )ﾉ*:・ﾟ


	13. The One on Easter

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam Parrish, at age twenty-one, can count on one hand how many gifts his parents had ever given him, occasion unspecified. He can count on both hands how many gifts he’s accepted from his friends in the three years he’s known them, and he had considerable difficulty allowing for them to be given at all. Adam, given his druthers, does not celebrate holidays. This is because, according to Ronan and Noah, Adam hates fun and is allergic to the concept of joy. This is not necessarily untrue, but Adam lets everyone decide his reasons for opting out of holiday celebrations for him, because it’s easier than explaining his sad, poverty-stricken, battered childhood. 
> 
> Aurora Lynch handing him an honest-to-god Ralph Lauren polo shirt strikes him simultaneously as very Catholic, very alien, and very kind in a way that Adam does not generally associate with being given things, and vaguely uncomfortable.

It is very, very weird to be in Ronan’s old bedroom. 

Adam’s not sure how or when exactly they ended up on the bed, but he’s not complaining. Except that he wants to be on top, because the novelty of having someone as heavy as Ronan on top of him wore off about ten minutes ago. In a maneuver that never once worked with Blue because she hated being manhandled and hated being under him even more, Adam gets Ronan on his back beneath him. 

“Good?” Adam asks. He hardly recognizes the sound of his own voice.

“Good.” Ronan is cradling Adam’s face between his hands and kisses him again. “So fucking good.”

Adam bites Ronan’s lip. “Don’t swear.” Ronan’s whine and the upward roll of his hips are almost too good to be true, and Adam has had a lifetime of being wary of all seemingly positive things, but Ronan’s yielding just enough to make Adam wonder if, for the first time, he’s not wrong to hope.

Hope is an uncomfortable feeling. Hope is a weapon in the hands of other people and in his own, sharpened on his ribs and heart and the shame of where he came from. Adam doesn’t trust himself to wield something like hope and not become his own collateral damage. 

Ronan makes a very compelling case for hope while his dick is hard against Adam’s hip. All of him is hard, his muscles tensed and eager, trembling just a little, and Adam has a mad urge to lose some of the thin layers between his skin and Ronan’s. The rational, responsible part of his brain tells him that would be a seriously bad idea, especially when the rest of the house will be starting to wake any minute, and Adam hates both time and going to a seven o’clock mas.

His erection has decided interest in making Adam feel young and stupid and wants him to make a very bad decision before they have to get ready for church. It doesn’t seem to care that Adam isn’t stupid and generally only makes practical decisions, or that they have less than ten minutes before the alarm on Ronan’s phone is going off.

Adam kisses the hammering pulse in Ronan’s neck and puts his hands on his hips--Ronan has that V of muscle and it makes Adam want to die a little--to make him stop moving. “We have to--”

“I know.” Ronan’s voice is rough but his hand in Adam’s hair is gentle. His throat bobs under Adam’s mouth. Ronan presses his face against Adam’s scalp for a long moment and Adam shifts so he’s laying on his side, still draped over Ronan, and closes his eyes as he talks his body down from its high as the sun starts to rise outside. Ronan turns his head after a while, and the loss of the point of contact, affectionate and unfamiliar, leaves Adam strangely bereft. The room gradually lightens on the other side of his eyelids, and when he opens them again the room is pale shades of purple and pink instead of black and blue, and Ronan’s facing out the window watching it happen.

“I used to wake up to watch this every morning,” Ronan murmurs. Adam lifts his head to watch him speak, because his voice is nearly too low to hear. “In an hour, the sun comes directly in this window until the afternoon, so I never got to sleep in. The first time I ever slept past eight was when I moved into Monmouth.”

Adam associates sleeping in with Ronan, so the disclosure is at odds with what he thought he understood. It isn’t the first time this week that his concept of one of the people he knows was rocked so completely--it had somehow managed to escape his notice that Noah celebrated Passover rather than Easter for the last several years, and Tad’s revelation is still not entirely reconciled in Adam’s mind. At this point, he half expects to hear that Blue’s estranged father decided to see her for the holiday or that Gansey is a real-life Benjamin Button and actually is a sixty year old in a twenty-one year old’s body.

“I didn’t think you ever woke up before noon,” Adam says.

The corners of Ronan’s mouth curve up a little. “I’m making up for lost time sleeping in for the last three years."

Adam hums thoughtfully, but he never gets a chance to ask Ronan what kind of making up for lost time is in store for them.

In the hall, a door opens and someone starts to head towards them. The door is shut, but Adam won’t risk staying in the bed with Ronan just in case the door opens. He gets up and crawls back onto the air mattress as Ronan shifts onto his side. They’re eye level while Adam is sitting up, and the eye contact paired with their tentative intimacy and Ronan’s vulnerability here makes Adam’s stomach twist in a way that isn’t entirely pleasant. In the hall, the footsteps stop for a moment outside their door before continuing to the bathroom.

Ronan sits up on his elbow and furrows his brow, listening hard to something Adam isn’t able to hear. “We can use the one downstairs for now.”

Neither of them make any move to get up, because they both know that despite the fact that they’re awake and have to start getting ready, they have to pretend to just be friends as soon as the bedroom door opens.

Considering that their first and only kiss was less than eighteen hours ago, Adam feels like the charade of pretending it never happened, that nothing changed yesterday, is going to be monumental. Herculean. A gauntlet the likes of which he never anticipated having to endure.

Ronan is sitting on the edge of the bed, looming without meaning to and blocking the first rays of sunlight from over the plum trees lining the driveway. He arches his eyebrow, and suddenly, under the dark stubble, he looks like the imperious, arrogant prick Adam met three years ago.

“Ready, Parrish?”

Adam summons some of the cool remove he used to rely on before he had friends. “Are you, Lynch?”

Ronan smile is a razor, but the edge of it is dulled by time and familiarity and fondness.

They get their toiletries out of their overnight bags and make their way out of the room and back down the hall towards the stairs. An alarm is going off in Matthew’s room, but the younger boys are still sound asleep when Adam and Ronan pass the open door. 

When they get downstairs, the kitchen light is on and coffee is brewing and Ashley is filling an electric kettle with water at the sink. She glances over her shoulder. Her face looks entirely different without makeup and with her hair twisted and pinned into place messily. Adam realizes that seeing her in Declan’s Columbia shirt makes him try to imagine them living together in their place in Manhattan, and it’s strangely domestic. It’s weird and Adam doesn’t like it.

“Morning,” she says. Ronan grunts and makes his way to the half-bath, and she rolls her eyes as he passes. 

The bathroom’s too small for him and Ronan to both use it at the same time, so he waits in the kitchen with her. “Morning. Sleep well?” 

She shrugs. “Not really. It’s too quiet compared to New York. I kept waking up.” She plugs in the kettle. “You?”

“I guess. We went out for a while because we were both up.”

“I thought I heard you guys leave.” She rummages in a cabinet for a coffee mug and holds it over her shoulder. “Having any?”

Ronan says something loud and unintelligible from the bathroom. 

“That was a yes,” Adam clarifies. “I will, too, please.”

Ashley hands him an earthenware mug and sets one aside for Ronan just as he comes back from the bathroom. She asks him how he takes it, but whatever he says in response Adam doesn’t hear once he leaves the room, but he knows the answer anyway.

The bathroom is so tight it’s claustrophobic, and Adam isn’t looking forward to trying to shave in here between the near absence of elbow room and the very low counter,and brushing his teeth in here is almost enough adventure for the morning. Ronan appears in the doorway with his mug in hand, and the already confined space gets a little smaller. Adam watches him in the mirror and Ronan is watching him. “So do you wanna stay down here to get ready, or do you want to get into the bathroom upstairs?”

Adam nearly has to bend in half to spit into the sink. “Am I a bad guest for wanting to use the bigger bathroom?”

Ronan shakes his head. He looks down, somewhere in the vicinity of Adam’s waist, and hits the door frame before he leaves. Adam realizes his shirt rode up a little when he bent over and smiles inwardly. Maybe it won’t be so bad playing pretend at just being friends if it means it’s going to get under Ronan’s skin in a way that is definitely exploitable.

Adam doesn’t feel badly about thinking that if he can have some fun with it, it will definitely be worth trying to set Ronan on edge.

***

Church is weird.

Some nearby old lady is wearing way too much perfume and Matthew and his friend are also wearing way too much cologne. A man a few pews down keeps coughing wetly and it makes Adam’s skin crawl every time. His face is itchy from being shaved so quickly before. He wonders if Ronan knows all of these people, since this is the church he’s gone to all his life. He and his brothers were baptized here, made communion here, were confirmed here.

Everyone is standing up again. It is too early for this sort of anemic exercising. 

As the congregation recites a prayer in a listless sort of monotone, Ashley sighs for the thousandth and checking her fashionably oversized Michael Kors watch and every now and then she meets Adam’s eye--they are, apparently, bonding over being the only two people in this church that don’t know the hymns and homilies and when to stand up. They’re wedged into the middle of the Lynch family’s pew beside each other, bracketed by their respective Lynch brothers, with Aurora to Ronan’s left and Matthew and his friend to Declan’s right. It escapes neither of their notice that Matthew’s friend Tyler knows exactly what to do, and they are also, apparently, bonding over being annoyed by that.

The prayer ends and everyone sits back down. The ritual of churchgoing strikes Adam as archaic and overly complicated, especially while he’s sitting here in his only suit, groomed in a way he never bothers with, sitting with men who are all wearing bespoke suits and tailored dress shirts and two women in designer dresses and real gold jewelry with real stones. It feels surreal and very formal. 

Ashley has a tan line on her left ring finger, and Adam wonders is she and Declan are going to maintain the charade all weekend.

At the diner, Ronan asked if Adam had noticed Ashley’s hand, and Adam had. Adam thinks that they’ve eloped, because Declan’s relationship with his family is strained and they don’t like Ashley. Ronan thinks his brother is just being secretive, because Ronan is biased and always assumes the worst when it comes to Declan. Adam has no strong feelings towards the oldest Lynch brother, but Ashley, regardless of what may or may not be indicated by the absent ring on her hand, is as much an outsider this weekend as he is. If that means they make each other feel a little less out of place, he won't complain about it.

She nudges Adam’s elbow with her own to get his attention. Very carefully, she mouths ‘I want to eat’ and Adam suppresses a smile. He thinks he could like her a lot.

When the mass is finally over, there’s a lot of activity around them, lots of conversation, and it’s suddenly much harder to hear after the quiet of the service. Aurora is saying something to him around Ronan but Adam has no idea what she’s saying, her accent visible on her lips, and he can’t understand her. Ronan says something to her and she makes a sad sort of face that lasts only a split second before she smiles again and reaches for Adam’s hand.

“I said I appreciate you being with us today,” she says, a little loudly. “Was this your first time?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Adam tells her. “My parents weren’t religious sorts.”

“Not everyone is. It takes all kinds, isn’t that what they say?” She gives Adam’s hand a squeeze and levels a very sincere, very kind smile at him. Ronan and Matthew have her eyes. “I know this was probably strange for you, but it means very much to me that you came with us today. Thank you.”

Adam’s throat feels sticky, but he doesn’t have a chance to say anything else because she’s getting up to speak to someone. On Adam’s other side, he hears Ashley murmur to Declan about how, just once, she hopes Aurora talks to _her_ like that. 

Church is weird even as they’re leaving and piling into cars to go back to the Barns. Aurora pulls him over to Declan’s Audi, and for a minute he’s afraid she wants him to ride with them, but she pops the trunk and hands him a shirt.

“Here,” she says. “I bought this for you during the week. I had to guess at the color, but I reckoned you and Ronan are about the same size. It’s tradition to get a new shirt for Easter, and everyone else already has theirs. I didn’t want you to feel left out.”

Adam Parrish, at age twenty-one, can count on one hand how many gifts his parents had ever given him, occasion unspecified. He can count on both hands how many gifts he’s accepted from his friends in the three years he’s known them, and he had considerable difficulty allowing for them to be given at all. Adam, given his druthers, does not celebrate holidays. This is because, according to Ronan and Noah, Adam hates fun and is allergic to the concept of joy. This is not necessarily untrue, but Adam lets everyone decide his reasons for opting out of holiday celebrations for him, because it’s easier than explaining his sad, poverty-stricken, battered childhood. 

Aurora Lynch handing him an honest-to-god Ralph Lauren polo shirt strikes him simultaneously as very Catholic, very alien, and very kind in a way that Adam does not generally associate with being given things, and vaguely uncomfortable.

“I--thank you, ma’am,” he manages after a moment of staring at the muted, earthy green fabric in his hands. “I can’t--

“Oh, hush,” she says, waving his attempted refusal away like a gnat. “Ronan warned me about this, and I have to insist that, at the very least, you wear this today so you don’t have to wear your suit.”

Gifts and gifting are things people who care about each other do, things done for people you care about in return. Adam has come to realize that, on the whole, people are generous creatures and gifts are not given with conditions and rules or as leverage, and that being prideful and unable to accept kindness because it’s easily misinterpreted as charity was hurtful to every party involved. 

Adam’s eyes burn a little, but he blinks it away fast while he’s staring at the monogram on the shirt. He can’t look Aurora in the eye, so he nods a little. “Thank you.”

Her hand is very small over his own, and she gives it a gentle squeeze. “You’re welcome, dear. Now shoo, or Ronan’s going to leave without you. Go on, go.” 

Walking back to the BMW feels a little robotic. Ronan is sitting on the hood of the car and Matthew and Tyler are already in the back seat. Ronan watches Declan’s Audi leave the church’s parking lot over Adam’s shoulder, then looks at him.

“I see she got to you,” he says, indicating the shirt in Adam’s hands. 

“Yeah.” Adam looks at the monogram and runs a fingertip over it. The fabric is soft, like it’s already been washed and worn before, but the color is vibrant and unfaded, speaking to the quality of it. Even off the rack, it will probably fit him better than anything else he owns, aside from the suit he’s wearing, which he’d needed tailored to make sure it fit properly. “It’s too much.”

Ronan looks into the car. The two teenage boys are more or less asleep, and Ronan reaches out and touches the back of Adam’s hand. “You like it?”

“I do. I just--I can’t believe she did this, I’ve never even met her before yesterday.”

“She does it for all of us every year,” Ronan explains. He’s still touching Adam’s hand. “Family thing.” 

Adam’s brow furrows and he pulls his hand away from Ronan’s. “We’re not family.”

Ronan frowns. “Yeah. Right.”

Adam knows they both have more they want to say, but Matthew and Tyler are waiting and they have to make the drive back to the Barns, so they say nothing. Ronan seems unhappy, and Adam’s mind tells him that it’s because of what he said. Now isn’t the time to try and explain that he didn’t mean it the way it probably sounded, except that he did. And didn’t. 

But he did.

The ride back is quiet. Ronan doesn’t put on any of his music, which means he’s upset, and Matthew and Tyler fall asleep before the car hits the edge of town. Adam stares out the window, at the quaint main street of shops and restaurants and the farmland beyond it, the imposing and impressive private school Declan graduated from and Ronan and Matthew were intended to graduate from, the miles of scenic views of the Blue Ridge mountains. Somewhere to the west of all this is Henrietta and the trailer park Adam grew up in. Somewhere to the west, Robert and Tracie Parrish don’t realize that this is the closest their son has been to them in years.

Adam swallows hard and wipes his hands on the edge of the seat. He feels Ronan looking at him, but he keeps looking out the window. 

“You okay?” Ronan asks. 

Adam shakes his head. He can’t feel the movement of the car or the weight of his body in the seat, and he has to close his eyes to try and block out the dark flicker of movement in the corner of his vision. He swallows again and taps the window, barely aware of his arm moving “I grew up looking at those mountains.”

The car is suddenly going a little faster. Ronan’s realizing that all this time, they grew up less than two hours and whole worlds apart because, undoubtedly, he's thinking of the stereotypes of inbred Appalachian hicks, meth labs, Baptist churches and snake-handling fringe sects, of teen pregnancy and high school dropouts and abject, pathetic poverty. The association alone with growing up in rural West Virginia, a region so misrepresented, feels damning. 

When Adam glances over at him, Ronan’s eyes are focused on the road ahead of them, hard as stone, and he’s chewing on the leather strands around his wrist. Adam feels weightless, like he could float out of the car if Ronan made a sharp enough turn.

“You never told me,” Ronan says. "That you were from around here." Adam shrugs, and Ronan resumes biting his bracelets with increased ferocity. 

Adam lets him chew on his bracelets for a long moment, then reaches across the console to tug Ronan’s wrist from his mouth, and he doesn’t let Ronan’s hand go. _Is this okay?_

Ronan looks at him, then at their hands. In the rear view mirror, Matthew’s head lolls against Tyler’s shoulder, both of them sound asleep. Ronan laces his fingers with Adam’s. _This is okay._

They're quiet for a while, until they get off the main road and start cutting through the switchback hills and turns heading towards the Barns. The mountains are behind them, now, and Adam feels himself return to his body again, as suddenly as he'd left it. Ronan seems to sense this and rubs his thumb over the side of Adam's.

"I didn't realize how close we were," Adam admits. "I knew you lived close to the Blue Ridge, but I recognized one of the peaks just now. I saw it every day out the living room window. It was weird seeing it reversed, knowing my parents are less than a hundred miles away looking at the other side of it."

Ronan drums his fingers on the steering wheel. There's something he wants to say, but Adam doubts that he'll find out what it is until they're alone again. As the turn off of the Barns' long driveway comes up, Ronan releases Adam's hand and reaches back to give Matthew a shake and wake him up. Ronan slows down to give the boys time to wake a little before they get to the house, but getting two tired teenagers out of the car, even with the promise of food and the two-on-two soccer match they were promised, is easier said than done. Ronan shoos Adam into the house to change out of his suit and stays outside trying to wrangle his little brother. 

Getting out of his suit is welcome, but he feels strange with the polo on. He tugs at it, smoothes his hands over it, fiddles with the collar to make sure it’s laying right. It looks like he borrowed a shirt from Gansey, or that he shouldn't be wearing jeans and socks with it, and Adam is still feeling slightly weightless and unlike himself when Ronan finally joins him. His tie is loose and his suit jacket has gone missing, but he has his new shirt in his hands. It's a faded, pale red and doesn't seem to have a collar like Adam's does. 

"Looking good, Dick the Fourth." He closes the door and tugs his tie off completely, tossing it onto his bed without watching to see if it makes it there. Adam rolls his eyes and picks it up to lay it out flat so it doesn't wrinkle, and by the time he turns back around Ronan is throwing his dress shirt at him. It lands partially on top of Adam's head, and the whole world is the lingering warmth of Ronan's body and the smell of him on the cloth. Adam pulls it off and scowls, because he would throw it at Ronan if that wasn't deliberately disrespectful of the expensive shirt. 

He settles for folding it and dropping it on the bed, and it's decidedly unsatisfying.

Ronan is already out of his slacks and pulling his jeans on when Adam turns around. He sits down on the bed beside the folded shirt and tie and tugs at his collar again. Ronan pulls his shirt on. It's thinner than Adam's, and fitted a little more, and it highlights the parts of his anatomy that are the most attractive. Which is to say, all of him, because Ronan is painfully attractive in a way that is best served in magazine ads. He stands on the other side of the room and puts his hands on his hips, thoughtfully, then crosses them. He uncrosses them again. Adam leans on his hands and waits for Ronan to say whatever's on his mind.

"Before," Ronan starts. Adam raises his eyebrows and waits patiently, but it takes Ronan several long moments to continue his thought. "You said we're not family. We are. We've been friends for years. You were there and helped hold me together when--" he stops again, because Ronan Lynch is a man of action and not words, and honesty is his way even when it's difficult for him. "You're family to me, like Gansey is. But different than him, you're not like a brother to me."

"I would hope, since you've been pining after me for three years." Adam smiles to try and make Ronan feel better, and it seems to. 

Ronan's posture relaxes and opens up again, but his expression remains serious. "You're important to me, so my mom's gonna treat you like one of us. And we're your family, me and Gansey and Noah and Blue, not those people across the state line. Okay?"

Adam stares at him, flabbergasted. For Ronan to be so open is unheard of. Ronan isn't open, but he is honest and family is more important to him than anything, so Adam has no choice but to believe him. Ronan's brow is furrowed as he looks at the floor, but it smooths out when he hears Adam get up. Adam approaches him, but he doesn't touch Ronan and Ronan doesn't touch him. He presses his lips together, and Ronan watches him do it. 

It's too much to expect Ronan to accept that Adam still misses his mother, or that it's hard for Adam to think of their friends as his family. Family isn't something Adam has a lot of desire for, or an understanding of. And he knows he'll never be able to explain that to Ronan, who might want one of his own someday, who understands and values what family is supposed to be. He'd been so frustrated with feeling strung along that he never stopped to try and imagine what it would actually be like to be with Ronan, if they would actually work or if they could have a future together.

Adam can't help but wonder if all the waiting and hoping for things to finally happen has been for nothing. 

He hooks his index finger in one of Ronan's leather bracelets. "We should probably go downstairs, before Matthew and Tyler eat everything."

Ronan nods, but he leans forward to rest his forehead against Adam's for a moment, and then he pulls his hand away and steps back, and he leaves Adam alone, feeling like he's bound to be disappointed, like he's wrong to feel even the tiniest flicker of hope.


	14. The One Where Adam Drives the BMW

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the passenger seat, Ronan is chewing blue bubblegum that reeks of cotton candy. Adam’s not as good with color as Ronan is, but he has a feeling the blue gum would be a near match for the color Ronan’s eyes. He wishes he could draw, because it would make a nice illustration for something, or a simple portrait, even with the stupid white sunglasses.
> 
> The longer he looks at Ronan, the more familiar the sunglasses seem to get, but he can’t place them anywhere. An ad, maybe, from a magazine in the counseling center? Is the style popular with the Greek houses? Did Blue or Noah have a pair like them, maybe in a different color?
> 
> “You keep looking at me like that and I’m going to start blushing,” Ronan says. “Even Gansey will notice something’s up if you keep eye-fucking me like that.”
> 
> Whatever affection Adam had been feeling for Ronan a moment ago dissipates instantly and is replaced by annoyance. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

They’ve been in the car for two hours already with six more to go before they’re back at school, listening to songs that were made to be sung along to, loud and bad and enthusiastic, with the windows down and the unseasonably warm air whipping into the car. Adam is wearing a pair of Ronan’s sunglasses, and every time he notices them in his reflection in the rearview he barely recognizes himself. Ronan seems content to let Adam drive the whole way, and it’s a strange to be driving Ronan’s car with Ronan in the passenger seat, but there’s been a lot of strangeness in Adam’s life over the past week.

The speakers vibrate with a song that was popular on the radio over the summer. Ronan made two long playlists for the drive of music Adam would know and not threaten to jump out of the car on an interstate highway over. While the effort is appreciated, the two combined only cover half of the trip, and the radio is either spotty or playing nothing but evangelism, painfully bad country music, or oldies. This is the third time since Saturday that they’ve heard this song.

Adam turns the volume down a little and looks over at Ronan, who is looking back at him. Adam sees his reflection in the lenses of the sunglasses Ronan’s wearing. The white frames clash with his dark clothes, but Adam wonders if they’re supposed to, like some kind of chic that will never make sense to him. 

“Eyes on the road, Parrish.” He leans forward as they cross into DC city limits switch to the radio, flipping through the stations until he finds a rock station that comes in clearly. “Fucking Pearl Jam, man.”

“Why do you have to shit on everything I like?” Adam asks him.

“Your shitty taste is your most glaring character flaw.”

Character flaws are one of the few things Adam has in spades, but his taste is not one of them. “I was gonna ask which exit is the right one, I don’t remember.”

“The one for Independence Avenue.” He groans and rubs his eyes under the sunglasses. “I hate this fucking city. Remind me why I agreed to this detour, again?”

“Because.” Adam turns the volume down a little further as the song changes and a DJ comes on, and he checks the mirror before switching lanes. “I have something you want and you’re easily manipulated.”

“I am not.” Ronan huffs. They both know Adam is right, at least in the regard that when Adam makes one of his rare requests, that both Ronan and Gansey are wont to drop everything to accommodate him. Where Gansey sometimes goes overboard with enthusiasm, Ronan pretends to be bitter and instead comes across as completely and utterly whipped. “Sadist.”

Adam shrugs. “That sounds like a problem for you, but call me that again and you’re gonna regret being right.” 

He can feel Ronan staring at him. “Sometimes you’re a scary dude, Parrish, you know that?”

“Cold blooded.”

“Like a fucking lizard.”

“‘Lizard Son’ is my middle name.” Adam gets off the exit. Ronan makes an irritable sound with his mouth, clearly peeved that the insult didn’t land the way he’d wanted it to. “We’re going over the bridge and onto Massachusetts, right?”

“Yep.” Ronan over-enunciates the ‘p’.

“And then over Rock Creek?”

“Yeah.” Ronan sits up out of his slouch to pay better attention to the road since Adam’s never driven in DC before and doesn’t know how to get to the Ganseys’ from this direction. “Not like you can miss it, it’s fucking huge.”

So huge, in fact, that Adam has gotten lost in it every time he’s been there, which is to say, no less than five times. The Ganseys’ home is over ten thousand square feet, and he knows this because he made the mistake of asking Helen about it the first time he ever went there. He regretted asking almost immediately, because up until that point, he didn’t realize homes could be built that large and that square footage over a certain point was reserved for industrial or commercial use. He misses being that naive. 

Adam had only been eighteen the first time he visited the Gansey mansion. He had been younger and thinner and angrier, and he wonders when all of those things changed; he’s still young, yes, because in no abstraction could twenty-one be considered old, and he’s still quite thin but managed to fill out and grow into himself at some point over the last three years.

“Korea,” Ronan says, counting off the embassies as they pass. “Japan. Venezuela. India. Guyana.”

The anger is still there, too, but it’s much less immediate than it was when Adam was eighteen. He’s found constructive outlets and has learned to redirect some of that latent aggression in more socially acceptable ways. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t feel like the fire of it isn’t still his base element, the source of power getting him through most days, but it’s a furnace now. Controlled and contained. It hurts to touch and occasionally flares up on its own, but it’s a lot less likely now to sear to the bone.

Adam no longer feels like he needs to be extinguished. Most days, anyway.

“We passed the Wilson House, too, right?” he asks.

To confirm this, Ronan says, “Nerd.”

The traffic slows just before the bridge and Adam leans his head against his hand, his elbow propped against the door. What must it be like to actually live in DC, or in any city, really, so claustrophobic with history and prestige and power? Knowing that any given Starbucks in Washington serves dignitaries and ambassadors and FBI agents is hard to think about, but then the thought of European seats of political power are dizzying. 

There had been a time when Adam had wanted to earn a place among the powerful, moneyed elite, to have a dustless, steel apartment overlooking a glittering city--sometimes the fantasy had included a sleek woman like Helen Gansey, sometimes Adam was alone, and other times he could sense a more masculine presence with him but never saw who it was. 

Then he realized that while he’d had Blue, when he’d been wondering what sort of man would make him pass up someone like Helen Gansey, the male presence that sometimes accompanied him in his power fantasy became Ronan, because Ronan had started to occupy a place in Adam’s dingy third floor studio apartment on the ass-end of a town that could never in its wildest dreams be dustless or host soaring skyscrapers.

In the passenger seat, Ronan is chewing blue bubblegum that reeks of cotton candy. Adam’s not as good with color as Ronan is, but he has a feeling the blue gum would be a near match for the color Ronan’s eyes. He wishes he could draw, because it would make a nice illustration for something, or a simple portrait, even with the stupid white sunglasses.

The longer he looks at Ronan, the more familiar the sunglasses seem to get, but he can’t place them anywhere. An ad, maybe, from a magazine in the counseling center? Is the style popular with the Greek houses? Did Blue or Noah have a pair like them, maybe in a different color?

“You keep looking at me like that and I’m going to start blushing,” Ronan says. “Even Gansey will notice something’s up if you keep eye-fucking me like that.”

Whatever affection Adam had been feeling for Ronan a moment ago dissipates instantly and is replaced by annoyance. “Don’t flatter yourself.”

Ronan laughs, and there’s an edge to it that doesn’t sound familiar. “Try to keep it in your pants when we get there if you don’t want to give Helen the wrong idea or scandalize Gansey’s grandmother.”

“I’ve gone almost nine months without, Ronan, I can go longer.” Adam looks at Ronan over the top of them when the traffic comes to a halt again. Ronan’s face flushes, unevenly and blotchy and some of his freckles disappear into it, but he meets the look challengingly. Adam raises his eyebrows. “How about you?”

It’s unfair to throw a line like that out now, when they’re ten minutes away from having brunch with Gansey and his family, and Adam knows it. But, the slightly spiteful, competitive part of him needs to know that Ronan will take the bait and answer truthfully, not the typical Ronan Lynch brand of half-truth-half-lie-of-omission. Because Adam can’t let things go, he still hasn’t forgotten that Ronan was MIA and was, more likely than not, with Kavinsky for a night almost a month ago, and because Adam can’t let things go, Kavinsky’s jibe that they’d had sex that night has been corroding in Adam’s mind like battery acid.

Ronan says, “You’re going to miss the turn.”

Adam does not miss the turn, but he does drop the subject. 

The sheer size of some of the houses in this neighborhood is staggering, and he wonders which of them are actually larger than the Ganseys’ as he pulls up to their gate. He sees Gansey on the other side, clearly waiting for them, in a pristine white shirt and horrible salmon pink shorts. The gate starts to slide open, almost soundlessly, and Gansey is striding towards the BMW.

“Thank god you’re here,” he says. He leans down at the driver’s side window to see them. His sunglasses cost more than Adam’s laptop and he smells like mint and lemonade. “I am bored out of my mind and my grandmother’s being more horrible than usual.”

“She’s being racist, you mean,” Adam says. He’s only met this grandmother once, and it is not an experience he wants to repeat, because she had more than a few choice words for Adam and his more than acceptably brown skin and less than grandiose accent, and she was entirely unapologetic about using them in his presence.

“Lovely woman,” Ronan says, in an affected posh accent that sounds nothing like Gansey and an awful lot like a character from Monty Python. “Which is to say, she’s a fucking hag.”

Sometimes Ronan needs to be shoved a little, and while Gansey would never do it, Noah isn’t there to do it for Adam, which leaves Adam to do it himself, and he does it now before turning his attention back to Gansey. “One of us has been slacking in training him. I blame you, since I only have him on weekends.”

Gansey sighs heavily and with appropriate contrition. “I should’ve known better than to take on such a hopeless case.” 

Ronan’s eyebrows are annoyed and Adam knows that behind the tacky white sunglasses, he’s being stared down. Ronan is half daring and half begging him to say nothing about what happened this weekend. He’s saved by Adam’s own discretion and Gansey’s phone making a chipper sort of chime. He pulls it out and types something, then leans back into the car. “Apparently Grandmother thinks me being vegan is because I’m shacking up with, and I quote, ‘that new-money Irish thug and that degenerate liberal hippie’ up at ‘that horrible state school’ in New York is cause for me to be taken out of the will and she’s been ranting about it since I came outside.” Gansey’s voice becomes conspiratorial. “I think she’ll spontaneously combust if she finds out I’m dating that degenerate liberal hippie and a woman of color at the same time.”

“You’re probably not wrong,” Adam offers. 

“Maybe she’d just shoot you,” Ronan says. “She’s probably packing heat in that purse she doesn’t let anyone touch.”

Gansey looks like he would not be at all surprised to find out his grandmother keeps a .45 in her handbag and checks his phone again. It wouldn’t surprise Adam, either, provided the .45 had pearl grips and gold inlay. One of Gansey’s eyebrows is halfway to his hairline.

“She also remembered you, Parrish, and she’s being racist.”

Adam sighs heavily, because he expected as much. He could nearly satisfy a diversity quota all by himself at this point, or at least fill out most of a representation Bingo card without effort. “That sounds about right.”

“‘Save yourselves,’” Gansey reads aloud. With a nod, the phone disappears into his shirt pocket and he claps his hands together like he’s calling a meeting to order. “Helen just told us to take off for a while instead of going inside. Lunch in town? I’ll take the Suburban so you guys can get back on the road right after.”

Adam and Ronan confer. Gansey’s content to do whatever it is Gansey does to entertain himself on his phone when no one’s engaging with him. Adam can see his white shirt and pink shorts out of the corner of his eye, and even stationary Gansey’s incredibly distracting when dressed like a Marshmallow Peep. 

_We’ll have t o come back here_ , Ronan’s pointed sideways look at the gate says.

Adam narrows his eyes. _Duh. But I don’t want to lose him in traffic._

Ronan’s shoulders roll in synch with his eyes _It’ll take even longer._

_Let him in the damn car_ , Adam’s nod towards the backseat says, even though he’s perfectly capable of unlocking the door himself. He wants the satisfaction of making Ronan do it. They stare each other down and battle their wills for a moment that probably lasts a fraction as long as it feels. Ronan’s lip curls. He swears under his breath, without heat, and he presses a button and unlocks the doors so Gansey can climb into the backseat. Feeling smug, Adam doesn’t suppress his smirk and backs out of the driveway.

***

Gansey directed them to a deli and ordered a wrap that, for Gansey, was so simple and straightforward that Adam was nearly stunned. It was still a complicated order, but it only contained about four ingredients, which was a marked improvement from most of the kinds of things Gansey normally orders. Adam gets an egg sandwich, and Ronan orders a grilled cheese because he’s actually a giant seven year old when it comes to being a picky eater, and between the three of them buy a variety of chips and drinks. They head over to one of the parks and sit under a pavilion to avoid the midday sun, and very quickly all the food they bought, save for Adam’s salt and vinegar chips, are demolished.

“Is it considered cannibalism,” Gansey asks, very innocently, “If your favorite chips are representative of you as a person?”

Ronan laughs so hard his soda almost comes out of his nose. 

“Ha ha.” Adam isn’t amused in the slightest. He waves a chip at both of them. “I get it. You’re hysterical. Ha ha ha. You’re both dicks.”

“No, that’s just him,” Ronan says as he points at Gansey, and Gansey’s lack of response is clearly unsatisfying for him. “I just have one.”

“As I’m well aware,” Adam says. 

Ronan flushes and Gansey chokes on his tea, sputtering into the bottle for a moment while he coughs and tries to not dribble anything onto his shirt. He pushes his sunglasses up onto his forehead and his eyes are round as saucers. 

“The fuck, Adam!” Ronan demands. His face is furiously red and his voice is a little high.

They’re both staring at Adam but don’t seem to be processing that he’s much more interested in eating his chips. It’s immensely satisfying to hear their minds both spinning into overdrive.

Ronan attempts to initiate another silent deliberation with Adam, but Adam pointedly ignores him and picks through his bag to find an unbroken chip. Gansey is audibly holding his breath, but Adam pointedly ignores him and starts making a pile on a napkin of all the unbroken chips he finds. The silence drags on for several very long minutes, at some point during which Gansey has no choice but to start breathing again and Adam starts eating his intact chips. Ronan is trying to get Adam’s attention the entire time, and even goes so far as to put his hand on Adam’s knee under the table, gripping it almost painfully, but Adam continues to ignore him.

When the pile of unbroken chips is gone, Adam says to Gansey, “What’s with the face?”

“Adam,” Ronan grinds out. “Parrish.”

Adam picks through the broken chips in the bag and starts sorting out the biggest pieces on the napkin. “Ronan Lynch.”

Ronan gets up noisily from the bench and storms off to fume alone somewhere, and Adam is glad he has the keys and Gansey to prevent Ronan from trying to drive off and abandon them here. 

Gansey taps his bottle of tea against the table, fidgety with nerves and a mystery to unravel. When Ronan is well out of earshot, he leans in close. “Did something happen between you two this weekend?”

“Maybe,” Adam tells him. “I can’t say yet. We didn’t really talk about it, but we have to.”

“So you’re not at liberty to confirm or deny anything.”

“Basically, yeah.”

Gansey takes his sunglasses off his head and runs his hand over his hair to make sure it’s still in place, then puts the glasses back on. “Until you two figure out where you stand, I won’t say anything.” He smiles, one of his genuine and one-dimpled ones that’s all Gansey and none of Richard Gansey III. “You seem happier than you were last week.”

Adam laughs, just once, and crumbles his now empty chip bag. “I was mad at him last week.”

“That’s not what I mean. But you know what I mean.” He starts rubbing his lip with his thumb. “I always want you to be happy, Adam. Both of you should be happy. You both deserve it more than most people do. I’ve known Ronan for more than half my life and I know he’s never happier than when things are going well with you. Just--if it’s not Ronan who makes you happy, decide that sooner rather than later. Please.”

Gansey’s earnestness is as surprising as it is discomforting. Adam shifts uncomfortably as Tad comes to mind, and he wonders if he didn’t do a good enough job making sure everyone understood that he’s not actually interested in dating him. “Why would you say that?”

Across the park, Ronan is being stared at by a very small blond girl from behind a tree. Adam can see him over Gansey’s shoulder. Ronan definitely sees her, but every time he moves she ducks behind her tree. Adam can’t tell from this far away if Ronan is annoyed or amused by her, because Ronan doesn’t particularly seem to like kids but they’re very drawn to him when it’s clear their parents wish they weren’t. 

“Is it because I’m bi?” Adam asks. Gansey blinks at him as if he’d forgotten. “Are you worried I’m going to break Ronan’s heart because I still like women?”

“No, of course not,” Gansey says. He sounds a little offended. “That would be very hypocritical of me, wouldn’t it?”

Adam hates the flush of guilt that goes through him for assuming Gansey’s intent. “So what is it?”

Gansey sighs and starts tapping his bottle again. “If you two are going to be together, I want you to be happy, and I’m not sure either of you are ready for that yet. Not with each other, anyway. I don’t want you to make each other miserable because he can’t verbalize his thoughts and you need him to.”

Adam blinks, overwhelmed by Gansey’s candor. He forgives some of Gansey’s naivete and his chronic foot-in-mouth and his tendency towards complete and utter obliviousness and his anxieties and his hoarding and his weird stims and obsessive interest in Welsh history. If Adam were so inclined, he’d feel like he just fell in love with Gansey; fortunately, Adam is not so inclined, and instead he just feels overwhelmed with affection for his frustrating, marvelous friend.

For all his life, Adam has had a very hard time defining what he wants and who he is. Dr. Poldma told him that that’s normal for someone with BPD, to have difficulty with such things. Gansey says he wants both Adam and Ronan to be happy, and they both know that Adam choosing to be with Ronan will make Ronan happy. But, when faced with the choice to make Ronan happy or making himself happy, Adam isn’t sure he knows which is the better decision. It’s one thing to know that he has to take his own happiness into account, but it’s another to not know what will actually make him happy. 

Adam asks himself what he wants and doesn't have an answer, even though part of him knows that "happiness" should be his reflexive response.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> [Here](http://www.zillow.com/homedetails/2850-Woodland-Dr-NW-Washington-DC-20008/456552_zpid/) is the Gansey family home for anyone who was wondering what exactly it is that Adam and Ronan pull up to.
> 
> Also, HMU on my[Tumblr](http://www.300foxholeway.tumblr.com/)!


	15. The One Where Adam Gives Ronan the Coca-Cola Shirt

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> While Adam waits for the coffee to brew, Ronan pulls the cushions off the couch to pull out the futon. How Adam manages to keep his sheets and blanket on and in place even when the couch is folded up is almost as impressive as the fact that he can fold hospital corners and speak Latin but still hasn’t grasped the concept of separating his laundry and can't manage to not burn microwave popcorn.

The whole first year he knew Adam Parrish, Ronan could barely tolerate him. The welding major with the hick accent and white trash wardrobe, was skittish and standoffish and serious, and he rubbed Ronan the wrong way from the second they were introduced. He was one of Gansey’s most unforgivable sins, because the advent of Adam Parrish was what prompted Ronan to admit, finally, that he was not interested in women in the slightest when there were guys in the world that looked like Adam did, indiscretions with Kavinsky aside. 

He thought Adam’s skin was always warm like he’d been in the sun, that his eyes changed color like seawater. He wanted Adam’s straight teeth and accented tongue and the knobs of his spine and the underfed angles of his shoulders and the oddly delicate curve of his wrists. He’d wanted to kiss Adam’s neck and find out if his throat would bob, or if he could feel the vibration of his voice against it. He wanted to know why Adam flinched from sudden movements and loud noises and raised voices and never, ever touched alcohol and wore shirts that were too big for him and why he couldn’t make eye contact for more than a second or two.

He wanted to hold Adam’s hand.

One of Adam’s most unforgivable sins was Blue Sargent. Not necessarily because of Blue herself--though Ronan would never admit such a thing aloud, especially never anywhere in her earshot--but because Adam fucked her for almost two years. Ronan could forgive her that trespass because she too appreciated Adam’s puzzling face and singular, strange attractiveness, but he was still holding a grudge because she got to sleep with him before and after Ronan had decided _he_ wanted to be sleeping with Adam. 

Blue also signified five infuriating things : that Adam’s type was female, that Adam liked short girls, that Adam liked girls with Coke bottle curves, that Adam liked a girl (or perhaps girls in general) who were not white, and that he liked girls that were weird and quirky and very much an art student stereotype. Ronan’s exact feelings on those five infuriating things could be summed up in a single word: _fuck_. This was because Ronan was very decidedly not any of those five things, in even the loosest sense. 

Thinking back on it all, it’s surreal to remember that he hadn’t immediately liked Adam, especially when Adam is sleeping very soundly and snoring lightly against the passenger-side window.

Traffic on the New Jersey turnpike derailed them completely and turned a four and a half hour trip into one nearly twice as long, because they’d had to avoid highways the rest of the way, and Adam made it another three hours before he admitted that, after the two hours from the Barns to DC he’d driven that morning, that he couldn’t finish the drive. They switched places at a desolate, run down rest stop, and they'd nearly spent the night there in the car before Ronan decided he'd rather just get back to school than prolong their trip another day. Adam fell almost immediately asleep as soon as the car was on the highway again.

Adam doesn’t wake until the car has stopped, and it takes him a moment to get his bearings. Ronan chews on his leather bracelets to distract himself from his desire to set something on fire when Adam rubs his eyes with both hands in a gesture strangely, endearingly childlike. 

“How long was I out?” he croaks. 

“The whole way,” Ronan says around his bracelet. “Like, before we even left the rest stop.”

Adam groans and looks outside, realizes they’re outside his building, and groans again as he scrubs his hand over his face. “Jesus.”

Ronan drops the bracelet from his mouth. “Mind if I come up?”

“I never mind,” Adam says. He gets out of the car and collects his things from the back seat. Ronan takes a few extra moments in the driver’s seat trying to control the furious sizzle of affection that goes through him. Adam has no idea how badly Ronan’s ached to hear him say he doesn’t mind Ronan’s presence, because knowing it through action and inaction is not at all the same as having it confirmed aloud. Ronan wants to punch something. He settles for gripping the steering wheel so tightly it hurts both of his hands and makes his arms shake, then gets out of the car.

Adam’s building is, for lack of a better word, a shithole. Situated in the middle of the main stretch of town, a mere block from two different streets with staggeringly high petty crime rates and located on the upper floors of a pizzeria that has no business being in business at all, Adam’s apartment is a third floor walk-up. It’s surrounded on all sides by noise from the street, from his neighbors, from his landlord’s business. It boasts a whopping four hundred square feet of studio efficiency apartment living, utilities included, for about six hundred dollars and change a month. The two windows are dark, grimy stained glass that’s sticky despite Adam’s repeated efforts to clean them and the water pressure is shit and the temperature is perpetually tepid. The only blessing, it seems, is that it’s not a house share and he has his own bathroom and kitchenette.

And, for an extra twenty-five bucks a month on his rent, he can order whatever he wants from the restaurant downstairs. That, Adam once said, was a mistake he only made once, during the first month he lived here, before he realized that no one in their right mind orders food from his landlord’s establishment.

If there’s anything that can be said in a positive way about Adam’s shitty apartment, it’s that all his neighbors go back to wherever they came from every time there’s some kind of time off from classes. This meant that, about once a semester, Adam essentially had his building to himself at the same time that the town’s population dropped by almost seven thousand residents. 

It’s so quiet, in fact, that Adam left his door open because he knew Ronan was following him up. He’s standing in his kitchen, frowning at his coffee maker, when Ronan shuts and locks the door. The pot is slowly gurgling to life and is protesting vocally, but the room is starting to smell more like coffee and less like pizza.

While Adam waits for the coffee to brew, Ronan pulls the cushions off the couch to pull out the futon. How Adam manages to keep his sheets and blanket on and in place even when the couch is folded up is almost as impressive as the fact that he can fold hospital corners and speak Latin but still hasn’t grasped the concept of separating his laundry and can't manage to not burn microwave popcorn. 

Adam is looking over his shoulder at him. He starts to twist his fingers, which he only does when the efficient but damaged, strange machinery of his brain is working tirelessly, thanklessly, because that’s what it was built to do. He looks at the coffee pot again. “Even with all the sneaking around and stuff the last couple days, I’ve been really happy. Which is kind of weird for me.” 

It’s weird for Ronan, too, because if he’s a stranger to feeling happiness, Adam is alien to it. But the sheer delight of Adam’s more cheerful smiles, his less prickly demeanor and more teasing jokes over the last two days, is something that Ronan would gladly raze an entire country to preserve. Adam has lived most of his life unhappy, and that has always been one of the most profound, cruel realities of the world Ronan could imagine. 

The person standing at the counter of this dingy kitchen with crossed arms deserves happiness and joy and to be spoiled beyond imagining, deserves all earthly comforts, every penny ever made to secure him. Ronan would happily suffer if it meant Adam didn’t have to. He’d give this man the world and ask for nothing in return but the permission to be there to see Adam enjoy it. 

Ronan crosses the room and crowds Adam against the counter. He uncrosses his arms and leans back, opening himself up for Ronan to wrap his arms around him, and he takes some of Ronan’s shirt in hand. They rest their foreheads together and breathe. They don’t speak, and they don’t need to. Just like the first time, they meet in the middle, like a compromise.

It’s just as thrilling now on Monday night as it was on Saturday afternoon. 

Compromises aren’t their thing, though. They push each other into corners, and that’s what kept them from getting this far for so long; they couldn’t make the jagged edges of themselves line up in a way that wasn’t going to eviscerate one of them and leave the other scarred. Meeting in the middle is new, unproven ground for them, and it feels treacherous and foreboding. Like it’s a minefield, rigged to explode at the slightest misstep. Caution is more Adam’s style than Ronan’s, but Ronan would rather seek out the safest path forward than risk Adam, who is already so full of shrapnel it’s a miracle he’s come this far.

The coffee pot stops gurgling, and Ronan pulls away from Adam to retrieve their mugs from a cabinet. Adam doesn’t completely let go of him, and Ronan thinks that he’is so starved for affection he’ll probably never be satisfied now that he has it again.

Adam fixes their cups as Ronan sits down on the futon and leans over to unlace his boots. Adam brings the mugs to his end table, then places one hand on Ronan’s shoulder for balance as he toes off his sneakers. A little anchor, a little show of vulnerability, and he doesn’t let go while he waits for Ronan to kick off his boots. There’s still nothing to say. Ronan takes Adam’s other hand in his and turns his palm towards him. His veins are prominent and they’re green under his ever summery brown skin, just like Ronan knew they would be.

A million and one times, Ronan has imagined tracing these veins with his fingertips and tongue. A million and one more, he’s imagined these fingers touching him, unmaking him, and has imagined them in his mouth. Sometimes, less often, because there is such a thing as too much of a good thing, he’s thought about Adam’s hands and how badly he wanted to hold them. Now that he can hold them, is holding one of them right now, he kisses the delta of veins at the base of Adam’s wrist.

Above him, Adam exhales shakily, and against the underside of Ronan’s chin, Adam’s fingers twitch. He would give anything to know what Adam is thinking right now. Because there is no real magic in the world, he finds out when Adam gently pushes him onto his back and remains standing, clenching and unclenching his fists. Ronan waits for him, like he always has, and tries to accommodate him by making a space for him between his legs. It takes Adam a long moment to lean down and brace his hands on the mattress beside Ronan’s ribs, one knee balancing on the edge between Ronan’s own. 

Many, many months ago, the proximity they allowed each other shifted. Anticipatory, maybe, or just precognitive. They dropped the pretenses of uncomplicated friendship and closed some of the distance they’d maintained until that point. It came as naturally as breathing. It was not strictly necessary for Ronan to spend so many nights at Adam’s apartment, especially when there was no place to sleep except for on the futon with him. It was more than mere practicality for Adam to start keeping some of his things at Monmouth, because he kept them stashed in Ronan’s room, rather than in the bathroom closet. They didn’t need to sit thigh to thigh on the couch at Nino’s, but they did anyway, and Adam didn’t have to lean on Ronan when he was tired or coming out of one of his bad episodes, but he did anyway. Ronan didn’t have to bother acting like he didn’t mean to wake up wrapped around Adam every time they slept next to each other, and he didn’t bother at all. Ronan has woken up with Adam in the mornings and gotten ready beside him in his cramped bathroom, has spent his days wearing Adam’s overlarge borrowed shirts to class and smelling faintly of him. Adam doesn’t allow anyone but Ronan to see him when he’s having one of his bad days, because he knows they don’t make Ronan think any less of him when he’s angry or violent or callous, when he becomes the negative space of Adam Parrish.

Many, many months ago, they started making steps towards something more, and that something more is what they’re both thinking about as Adam settles between Ronan’s legs. He isn’t as heavy as he should be, but he’s heavy enough as he settles between Ronan’s legs and buries his face against his neck. Lying together like this is new but familiar, like inevitable things sometimes are, and it’s quite comfortable for an indeterminate amount of time.

Eventually, Adam sits up to drink some of the coffee. He makes a face, a scrunched-nose and furrowed brow face, and drinks again. The coffee has probably gone cold, or cool enough to taste horrible without any sugar or cream. He visibly bites his tongue a little and sets the mug back on the end table. The mug was a gift from Matthew once on some holiday, as offensively yellow as Gansey’s favorite sweater and bearing a smiley face on it, and because it is a vessel for coffee, much like Adam himself, he favors it unironically.

“You want yours?” Adam asks him while he’s still mostly upright. 

Ronan nods and extends his hand towards it, but he can’t reach it because he’s not sitting up and it’s too far away. “Yeah, gimme it.”

Adam rolls his eyes. “Don’t make me say it.”

“Say what?”

“You know, that parental thing,” Adam says. “The magic word thing.”

“Jesus Mary, Parrish, what are you, my mother? Give me my damn coffee.”

Adam’s mouth quirks up at the corner and he stops reaching for Ronan’s mug, which is black and bares the phrase “I’m not always a bitch, just kidding, go fuck yourself,” with “bitch” being in a larger and more elaborate font than the rest. It had once been Blue’s, but she’d forgotten it was here when she collected her things after she and Adam broke up, and Ronan discovered it in the back of a cabinet and claimed it for himself. Adam puts one hand on Ronan’s chest to keep him from sitting up, with just enough of his weight behind it to keep Ronan down; not that Ronan was trying overly hard to get up anyway. “Say the magic word, Lynch.”

Ronan glares up at him. “Are you ransoming my coffee over a word? I take it back, you’re not my mom, you’re Gansey.”

“I can think of worse things to be. And I know for a fact your mom raised you to say ‘please’, so don’t act like it’s so hard.”

“You asshole,” Ronan says without heat and with affection and annoyance. Adam raises his eyebrows. “Ugh, fine, _please_. Now gimme it, Jesus fucking Christ.” 

Adam sighs as he leans over to get the mug, and Ronan props himself up on his elbows to take it from him. It’s not cold, but considerably cooled. Ronan doesn’t mind much given the hour, but he’s not surprised Adam made a face over it. He hands it back empty. Adam doesn’t necessarily need to get up to put the mugs in his sink because it’s literally within arm’s reach from his position, but he gets up anyway. After depositing them and filling them with water, he goes to his dresser and pulls out a change of clothes for himself and Ronan. 

Ronan doesn’t leave clothes here because Adam doesn’t have the space to spare for them, so he takes the offered basketball shorts and the Coca Cola shirt Adam had taken back from his room at Monmouth two weeks ago. It’s a silent apology, or maybe a peace offering or a gift. Knowing Adam, it is all those things and more. 

They don’t make any great show of giving each other much privacy as they strip out of their clothes and into the pajamas. They don’t really need to, and considering the last few days, they don’t particularly want to. 

Adam has seen Ronan with his shirt off more times than either of them can count, because that is how Ronan most prefers to be. Getting to look at Adam without pretense or performed disinterest is thrilling and dangerous and a little difficult to look at, which in a lot of ways is exactly what looking at Adam is always like for Ronan, and probably for other people. Adam Parrish has that effect on people. 

When he rejoins Ronan on the futon, the easy and comfortable way he settles against Ronan’s side makes Ronan feel warm and light and a little fizzy. Adam rests his head on Ronan’s shoulder and loosely puts an arm around his waist, and Ronan is a match held before it’s given to tinder, the catch of an engine, champagne bubbles, soda carbonation in a shaken can, the head on a glass of good beer, like fireflies in summer and dandelion seeds on a hot breeze. 

“I’ve surpassed caffeine addiction,” Adam intones, very seriously. “I’m still exhausted.”

“This is a sign to switch to espresso.” Ronan adjusts his arm to put it around Adam’s shoulders and pulls him in, and Adam allows it and rolls onto his side to make it more comfortable. 

“I’ll switch to espresso when it stops being four dollars a shot,” Adam says. 

“They make coffee with more caffeine in it.”

Adam laughs, just once. _Ha_. “I need fifty pounds of it yesterday.”

“Let me warp space-time for a minute and you’ll have it.”

Adam laughs again, this time more than once. “How? With a Time Turner or reality warping superpowers?”

Ronan scoffs. “Superpowers, duh. I’m not a fucking wizard.”

“Using your powers to get me stronger coffee seems like a waste,” Adam muses. He has no idea that Ronan would give him whatever he desired if he would allow being doted upon. “At least, like, make impossible things with them.”

“That would be a worthy application of my superpowers. I could sell the stuff I made and never have to worry about working.”

“You don’t have to worry about that anyway.”

Ronan shrugs, as much as he’s able to. “Well, yeah. I forget that I don’t have to sometimes.”

Adam sits up and looks at him, eyes narrow and searching. “Yeah, it must be hard to remember you’re loaded when your four hundred dollar sweatshirts go missing.” Kavinsky has the sweatshirt Adam is probably referring to, but he can’t figure out how or why Adam would know that. Adam looks at him for a moment longer, but when he doesn’t seem to find what he’s looking for, he settles back down. He’s not as relaxed or close as he was. 

Two steps forward, four back. 

***

“Before you ask, I’ve been here the whole time.”

“Alone?” Ronan asks. He’d never thought he’d see the day that Kavinsky wouldn’t disappear in favor of some beach somewhere the minute classes ended. Adam has spent most of the remainder of break in his studio to begin assembling his sculpture or pulling extra hours at work, and Ronan is left to his own devices during the day and into the night. When he finally got bored and restless enough to not be able to paint anymore, he made his way across campus to the townhouses, and Kavinsky is almost so depressed he could barely get up to answer the door.

“Not alone.” K says as rubs the bridge of his nose and retreats back into the bowels of his townhouse, leaving Ronan to shut the door and follow after him. “My sober coach has been around. Everyone else fucked off to Mexico, or fuck knows where you’ve been.”

The townhouse is empty save for them. “Where’s your coach now?”

Ronan hates it here. It’s cavernous, built and laid out in a style that’s somehow very dated and cheap despite the buildings themselves being fairly new, and even in daylight it’s dark inside becuase there aren’t many windows even for an end unit. Kavinsky’s taste in decorating, since he’s lived here alone since the accident with Prokopenko, has both improved and gotten worse. He’s always been a little loud and tacky, but the absence of bodies makes the trashiness of his furniture more apparent, but it is cleaner now than it used to be. Questionable stains stand out now when they didn’t before, but there’s considerably less trash around than there once was. Ronan wonders who’s been cleaning it, since he’s not sure he’s ever even seen Kavinsky touch a paper towel in the years they’ve known each other. 

He can’t imagine Jiang or Swan or Skov coming over to clean up, and being a maid seems like it’s not in the job description of a sober coach. The trust fund in Kavinsky’s name, if he still has access to it at this point, must be paying for some kind of cleaning service.

Kavinsky shrugs and collapses heavily onto his couch. “It’s his day off. Babysitters need those, too, I guess. Where were you?”

“I was home.” 

“Back to the farm, huh? Fucking quaint as shit, Lynch.” 

Sober and still, he hardly even looks like himself, and Ronan is struck by a sideways sort of notion that he has a type, and that this shadow of Kavinsky and Adam are both examples of it. It’s unsettling and makes his stomach and heart tug in opposite directions.

Kavinsky is wearing the ransomed sweatshirt again, and it seems even bigger on him now than it did the last time Ronan saw him, which is distressing in a way that’s hard to contain but harder to let show. He’s getting painfully thin, wasting away. Ronan has heard him say too many times, in too many varied ways, that he’s always wanted to disappear, and he wonders if someday soon Kavinsky will manage that particular trick. Ronan feels badly for wondering if that would mean he gets the sweatshirt back, or if he’ll even want it at that point. 

He read online that the depression was supposed to end eventually, along with the coke bugs and cravings, but Kavinsky’s no better off now than he was months ago when he came back from rehab. There have been relapses here and there, but K isn’t stupid enough to have gone on a bender and risk getting hauled back into treatment. All he’s doing is prolonging his suffering, but this two month stretch is the longest he’s gone without using again, and that seems like a huge step forward for someone who may be allergic to sobriety.

“You okay?” Ronan asks. It takes Kavinsky several long minutes to respond, and he starts getting twitchy from trying not to scratch at the crawling sensation on his skin. “You don’t look good.”

K laughs, and it’s bleak and devoid of joy. “Never have I ever,” he says, like the drinking game. There’s a pause where, if they were playing, he’d take a shot. There’s no alcohol in the house anymore because all of Kavinsky’s bad habits, save for cigarettes, have been taken from him. It’s no wonder he’s so depressed. 

Without his vices, there isn’t much to Joseph Kavinsky as a human being because he never had a chance to or develop as one, as he lacks the interest and investment in his own existence necessary.

“You ever gonna give that back?” 

“This old thing?” Two bony fingers pluck at the fabric so he can read the French brand name across the chest. “I like it and it was free, so no. Tough titties, Lynch, it’s mine now.”

“You have the money, K. Buy your own, or be good and wait ‘til Christmas like everyone else.”

Kavinsky laughs again, and this time he almost sounds like himself. “There’s no one left to buy me shit, I’ll be waiting forever. Fuck that.”

K’s mother OD’d while he was away, and it was no great secret that he’d learned most of his bad coping mechanisms from her. This is the first time he’s mentioned her death since it happened, but he doesn’t seem particularly broken up over it. Ronan, who has been mourning his father since he was sixteen, can’t fathom how Kavinsky seems so unperturbed by his mother’s death, but he may not be capable of mourning or bereavement. If anything, his lack of addressing the situation with Prokopenko’s coma might be a testament to his inability to feel loss. 

 

The people that brought Joseph Kavinsky into the world hadn’t been equipped to raise their son any more than Adam’s parents had been--another monster father, another inept and absent mother, another haunted house it took too long to escape from, and another son the casualty of human cruelty. Ronan doesn’t know what he did to deserve the family he was born into, and it hardly seems fair that two of the people he cares about the most didn’t do anything to deserve the shitty hands they were dealt. 

Kavinsky lights a cigarette with a lighter shaped like a handgun. It looks heavy and real in his thin hand and the whole townhouse smells like cigarettes. He offers Ronan one, because while Kavinsky is a shitty person with no manners and a profound lack of generosity and kindness, he’s never been stingy with sharing his cigarettes or his weed. Some kind of misplaced sense of hospitality, Ronan supposes, and he watches Kavinsky examine the lighter for a moment before he sets it back on the table.

He doesn’t like how real the lighter looks.

They’re quiet for endless minutes when, a few months ago, or even a few weeks ago, Kavinsky would’ve filled the room with chatter and music and localized, small-scale chaos. The peace is disquieting and entirely at odds with who Kavinsky has made himself out to be. Under his flashy clothes and expensive toys and coarseness, he’s brittle and insecure and built on a cracked foundation, wasting away under a borrowed sweatshirt he’s been using like a security blanket. Kavinsky is entertaining himself--no, Ronan decides, because Kavinsky isn’t entertaining himself at all--is blowing smoke rings, because it’s something to do.

“Parrish,” Kavinsky says after a while, without prompting, and the suddenness of it, in any other place, would make Ronan expect to see Adam nearby. But, because Adam has never been here, and actively seems to hate Kavinsky, that would be impossible. 

Ronan waits for Kavinsky to say something more, and after a stretch of time that probably should leave the thought forever unfinished, Ronan prompts, “What about him?”

Another smoke ring. Then another. They almost seem thoughtful. “Just thinking how you have a type. Kind of sad, actually, since you say you don’t have daddy issues but you like the ones that do.” 

Ronan stares at him. To feel so known by someone who cares so little for other people makes his skin crawl. It’s a slightly vulnerable, naked feeling, not at all what he’d hoped being known would feel like. It’s discomfiting, too, that anyone could ever hit on unknowable Adam’s baggage quite so accurately. If his silence surprises Kavinsky, it doesn’t show. He’s harder to read when you can see that his eyes aren’t black holes and he isn’t posturing. 

“Birds of a feather, man. Peas in a fucking pod.” Another smoke ring. “I know that look, I could see it on him freshman year. Whatever the shrink has him on must be the good shit, he almost acts like a real person these days. Lucky bastard.”

There’s a row of prescription bottles and a pill case with carefully portioned out pills, doses for every day of the week, morning and night, and another for those as-needed occasions, lined up on the dresser in Kavinsky’s bedroom. Two different antidepressants, a mood stabilizer, one for anxiety, an appetite stimulant. The antipsychotic. Mild uppers to help him function and attend classes. No more sleeping pills because he can’t be trusted with them. 

Adam’s a secretive creature, but it would be very difficult to hide being even half has heavily medicated as Kavinsky is. Ronan doesn’t even think Adam’s insurance, if he even has any, would cover most of the medications Kavinsky’s doctors have him on, let alone the good shit. 

His phone vibrates in his pocket, and he can tell by the pattern that it’s Adam. Not wanting to take the call here, he gets up. Kavinsky looks up at him, expression unreadable when he notices the buzzing sound coming from Ronan’s jeans.

“The missus,” he says, tone accusatory, “Keeps you on a short leash these days.” 

Phone in hand, Ronan replies, “Yours is pretty short, too.”

Kavinsky stands up. At five-seven he’s not imposing, but he can make up for what he lacks in height with presence, even stone-cold sober and nearly catatonic with depression; if he was taller, he’d probably be much more obviously unhinged and dangerous. He steps up onto the coffee table, disrespectful even of his own things. 

“Don’t remind me,” he snaps, expression darkening. The gun lighter is between his feet. He takes a long drag of his cigarette and doesn’t make any effort to not blow the smoke in Ronan’s face as he leans forward to tap the phone when it buzzes again. “Your hick friend has a jealous streak, you know. And he doesn’t know how to share. It’s unfortunate, really, because Swan’s roommate seems to be spending a lot of time jonesing after his dick just like you do, and I’d hate for him to get greedy and think he can have his cake and eat you, too. I don’t think food stamps would cover that.”

Ronan punches him in the face without a conscious thought and sends him collapsing backwards onto the couch, and his face makes a sound that a face shouldn’t make. Kavinsky swears and drops his cigarette when his nose starts bleeding, broken, making his already defined profile worse by making his nose crooked. 

“You’re so fucking sensitive,” Kavinsky says. He cups his hand under his nose to catch some of the blood and keep it off the sweatshirt. The skin under his eyes is already starting to bruise. He touches the bridge of his nose, and pops it back into place. His eyes water. Ronan, who is not squeamish in the slightest, winces a little, but Kavinsky doesn’t notice as he gingerly uses the sweatshirt’s sleeve to sop up the blood on his face.

Ronan is most of the way to the door when Kavinsky stops him. He’s on his feet again, on the other side of the coffee table, bloody and bruising and pissed off. The cellphone is still buzzing in his hand. He answers it, without breaking eye contact with Kavinsky.

“Hey,” Adam says. “I wasn’t sure you’d pick up.”

“I was busy,” Ronan says. “Trying to figure out where I left that hoodie you were talking about.”

Adam is quiet for a moment. “How’s that going?”

“I threw it away. It got bloody. Made more sense to throw it in the trash.” Across the room, K’s face is perfectly blank with shock for a split second before he flickers back, incendiary. “No sense in keeping it that way, right?”

“Right.” Adam doesn’t sound convinced “You ready to go to the airport for Noah?”

“Yeah, I’ll be by in a few minutes for you.” He hangs up, and Kavinsky’s expression is scorched. 

“I will fuck you up,” he says.

He’s been trying and failing at that for years. “You wish.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a while since my last update, but I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has read this and commented on it--I see everything, and I know I'm horrible at replying, but I appreciate every new comment and kudos more than I could ever express in words. I love you all, and you're why this silly project has endured for as long as it has, and will keep moving forward.


	16. The One With the Support Group

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I didn’t relapse over break,” Kavinsky says. People murmur their support for the accomplishment. “But I couldn’t get out of bed for three days in a row, so, you know, baby steps. And his,” he points across the room to Adam, and everyone turns to look at him, “His boyfriend broke my fucking nose on Friday. So that kind of took a shit on my whole break.”
> 
> The whole room goes a little still and quiet. Professor Allen clears his throat. “I see you two know each other.”
> 
> “Not really,” Adam says at the same time Kavinsky says, “No shit.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry this took so long! The good news is that the next chapter is already half written and I'll be updating this, and maybe even _The Colors You Have_ very soon!

“Oh,” Blue says, “My god.”

“All of them,” Noah agrees.

“Entire pantheons,” Gansey also agrees, less surprised than his girlfriend and her other boyfriend are. 

There is no way to subtly disentangle two bodies when both of those bodies are as long as Ronan and Adam’s are. There’s a lot of limb to be moved and clothing to be righted and the couch is narrow and leather. Ronan tries and fails to flatten Adam’s untameable hair. The effort is wasted and there will be no fixing it now, but Adam lets him try anyway.

There is a bruise made by Ronan’s mouth forming on his neck. Ronan’s shirt is hanging off the back of Gansey’s desk chair because that’s where Adam tossed it. Their mouths are kiss-bruised and they’re both flushed and hard and agitated from being interrupted.

They were supposed to have the apartment to themselves for the better part of the afternoon, and here they are, not alone and caught in the prelude of the act, too rumpled to be remotely decent. The couch creaks as Ronan leans over to get his discarded shirt. Ronan’s fair skin is his worst enemy when he’s embarrassed and he’s turning a very obvious shade of red as he covers himself back up. Adam isn’t as given to flushing like that and he doesn’t color half as easily, but there’s heat creeping up the back of his neck in sympathy. Or camaraderie. Or something. 

“You knew already,” Adam reminds Gansey. His nerves feel frayed and it takes considerable effort to keep his voice normal, and he’s not sure he succeeds. “You’ve known for a week.”

Noah gasps, thoroughly offended to be among the last to find out about this. Blue beams and attaches herself to Adam’s neck and shoulders. He’d be choking if he was any shorter or taller, but she smells like that body wash she’s always liked and sunshine and she’s soft and warm against the back of his neck as she kisses the top of his head. Her joy on his behalf and her comforting, familiar presence almost mean as much to him as Gansey’s did.

“Attaboy, Coca-Cola,” she says, just loudly enough for his good ear to catch. He pats her arms and twists to look back at her. She’s beaming, happy for her friends and glad that the prolonged quasi-courtship has finally culminated in something.

To diffuse the light fizzy feeling in his head, Adam says, “Only your moms get to call me that.”

Blue kisses his head again, a little harder, like it’s supposed to be a punishment. “Oh please. Calla is not my mother.”

In Adam’s experience of Blue’s family, Calla was definitely her mother. Secondary to her actual mother, a lifelong fixture in Blue’s life, Calla demanded to be respected by everyone who knew her, just as much as Blue’s mother Maura was as keenly likable. Blue was blessed with family the same way Gansey and Ronan and Noah all were, but in an excess that they didn’t have--a small house stuffed to bursting with aunts and cousins and they were all loud and loving and fond. He never, in his life, even having grown up in a more rural part of the Bible belt where families tended to be started young and often grew exponentially, had been in a house so crowded as 300 Fox Way. It was overwhelming. It was worse than meeting Gansey’s family for the first time and feeling small and shabby and poor around them. It was stranger than meeting Noah’s family and realizing, very abruptly, that he’d never met an immigrant family or a Jewish family before and that he was terrified of offending them somehow. It wasn’t as intimidating as meeting Ronan’s mother, but meeting Maura Sargent and Calla Johnson had been the absolute most scary thing he’d ever done up until that point.

Gansey and Noah are fussing over Ronan, and that means it’s only a matter of moments before they turn on Adam to get the answers to questions Ronan will refuse to answer. Blue will wait until she can get either of them alone before conducting her own investigation, but for now she’s more interested in giving Adam one last hug and joining in on harassing Ronan for the hell of it. 

While his friends are distracted by each other, Adam scrubs his hand over his face and tries once more, in vain, to smooth his hair back down before he gets up to make coffee. The clock on the oven tells him that he doesn’t have much time before he has to go, and for once, not to work or a class. Today is the first meeting of the support group, and no one knows he’s decided to go, which is exactly what he wants. 

It’s one thing to consider attending out loud to someone. It’s another thing entirely to make the choice to go, and Adam isn’t quite ready to put that out into the universe. 

“Are those scratches on your _scalp?_ ” Noah asks. 

Adam doesn’t have to be looking at Ronan to know he’s bristling. “I’ll swing for you, Noah, I swear to God.”

“Jesus Christ,” Noah says, as if Ronan hadn’t threatened him. “Don’t maul him, Adam. Nice hickey, by the way.”

Gansey laughs, once, and tries to cover it up with a cough, but Blue isn’t nearly as polite about it. She guffaws and pokes it. Adam smacks her hand away and she laughs again. “There is no way you’ll be able to cover that up,” she says. “It looks like you were attacked by a vampire.”

Noah pats Ronan’s head. “He’s certainly pale enough. And he has those nice teeth.”

“You’re going off the fucking fire escape,” Ronan grumbles. He catches Adam’s eye and looks at the bruise for a second before the color in his cheeks flares again and he looks away.

The coffee pot beeps as it finishes brewing and everyone congregates in the kitchen to get a cup after Adam pours for himself. Noah goes to the fridge to get a carton of half and half out, and he hands Gansey a box of almond milk. 

“I didn’t know almonds were mammals,” Ronan says. Adam snorts. 

Unperturbed, Gansey pours the almond milk into his mug. “Are you under the impression that you’re clever? Because you’re not.”

“Fuck you, I’m hilarious.”

Gansey points at him with his spoon. “That is a damn dirty lie, Lynch, and you know it.”

Noah takes the spoon from Gansey and licks it clean before using it to stir his own coffee. It’s gross and oddly domestic and no one but Adam seems to even notice it. “Don’t let him try and distract us from the real issue here. I need details about what the hell happened over break and I will not rest until I have them.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Adam says. “He kissed me last weekend and I kissed him back.” 

In the time before Adam has to leave to get across town to the campus, between Ronan’s recalcitrance and Adam’s privacy, they tell everyone enough details to satisfy them. He almost feels bad leaving Ronan to fend off their curiosity alone, but Ronan Lynch has never spoken a word he didn’t want to. When Adam gets off the couch to head out, everyone watches him and Ronan like they’re anticipating a goodbye kiss, and they only seem a little disappointed when Ronan lets Adam go without any fanfare.

The campus theater building, when he gets there, is chaotic. On the stage, there’s a rehearsal for some play going on and there’s a flurry of activity in the concert pit, where students and the directors are critiquing a performance by a group of boys in school uniforms. Tad is on the stage with them, demonstrating something with his hands, and Adam ducks into the stairwell to the basement annex before Tad can turn around and see him.

He does not, under any circumstances, want anyone he knows finding out he did decide to come to this support group meeting. Especially not Tad, who is too talkative by half and already knows how often Adam goes to the counseling center. He also doesn’t want to have to have the uncomfortable platonic breakup talk with Tad, because Tad genuinely likes him and deserves to have the guy he likes like him back. And Adam does like Tad, sometimes, when he’s not talking a mile a minute and flirting shamelessly with him.

The room where the support group is holding their meeting is an awkward combination of dressing room and kitchenette, with a long shallow counter running the length of one brightly lit and mirror-covered wall and a row of deeper, more practical counters and a freestanding sink, microwave, and mini fridge on another. There’s a semicircle of folding chairs across from an ugly orange velour couch, and there are props and a rack of medieval and Colonial-era clothes in the far corner. 

There’s a handful of people milling about, some lingering near the Keurig coffee maker, some in the folding chairs. There’s a tall girl with wild dark hair draped over the entire length of the couch, and a man who is so conspicuously nondescript that he manages to have a dominating presence in the room, despite the way his clothes blend in with the gray walls.

Joseph Kavinsky is sitting on one of the folding chairs. 

Adam nearly turns around and leaves.

The man in all gray sees Adam hesitating in the doorway and approaches him, in a way that might not actually be approaching him. He looks down the hallway. He looks at Adam. 

“I’d like to close the door,” the man says. “If you’d like to join us, please come in.” Adam looks at the man, then at Kavinsky, down the hall again, and back to the man. The man follows his attention. “You and I can speak privately after we’re all done here at four, if you’d prefer.”

Adam feels eyes on him, like a physical weight on the side of his face, and it takes every ounce of self-control he has to not wither under it. If he doesn’t do this, after mentally preparing for it all weekend, he’s not sure he’ll manage to come back at all, even to speak to this man alone. He steps into the room, away from the man in the doorway, and he hazards a glance towards the person looking at him. The tall girl with wild hair, is peering at him over the back of the couch, and she makes a delighted crowing sound when he looks at her.

“Fresh meat!” she singsongs, drumming her hands on the couch back. Everyone ignores her, but he does notice a few people glance over at him. She’s got a very European accent that Adam can’t place, and a mouth full of crooked but white teeth. “What a treat, it’s been bloody fucking ages since I cut my teeth on somebody new.”

“Gwen.” The nondescript man’s voice carries authority in a way that doesn’t seem authoritative, but it encourages obedience. The girl laughs but stops cackling and puts both hands in her hair, playing with it and teasing it even bigger and wilder.

Unfortunately the arrangement of the seating and the chairs that are already occupied leave Adam at a disadvantage, lopsided, casting half the circle into distorted muffled sounds he can only hear properly if he turns his head to favor his good ear. There’s a seat that would probably present him with the least amount of difficulty, but it’s sandwiched between Kavinsky’s folding chair and Gwen’s perch on the couch.

Before Adam is forced to choose to sit beside either Gwen or Kavinsky, the professor drags a chair just outside of the semicircle and the rest of the chairs are shuffled around to close the gap. “Feel free to take this chair and move it where you’ll feel comfortable. You can observe for today, get a feel for things.”

A separation for the group’s meeting because he’s a newcomer, a stranger. He wonders if it’s for his own benefit or that of the other attendees.

“Dean Allen.” He offers his hand to Adam, and his expression is pleasantly neutral, as if he wouldn’t be offended if Adam didn’t take it, but he’s leaving that opportunity for Adam to take or deny. Adam doesn’t deny it, but some part of this man’s quiet, absolute control disquiets him, rattles some part of his resolve to be here all over again. 

“Adam,” Adam manages, after a beat. “Parrish.”

“We’re glad to have you here, Adam. There's a few minutes before we start, so take your time finding a place to put your chair.” Dean Allen walks away to speak quietly to someone else and Adam carries the folding chair across the room to a spot where his compromised hearing won’t impede him. The other people in the room gradually stop milling around and take their seats and a few of them glance over at Adam, some even smile politely, but mostly they don’t react to him. He’s not sure if that’s normal or if he should be bothered by it, and he hates that it sits under his skin and twinges like a splinter.

It’s strange how, in some ways, the group’s structure echos what TV has lead Adam to assume a substance abuse support meeting goes. People are greeted by name before they speak, then they describe their weeks off from classes.

Allen, who Adam realizes is a professor of some kind about halfway through the meeting, spent the time off visiting his girlfriend and her family upstate and claims to have seen a McDonald’s that was closed for the winter season. People are alternately shocked, scandalized, and disbelieving. A girl named Cheyenne spent spring break on Long Island with her friends and gained five pounds. People congratulate her. A boy named Jared was able to go to church on Easter and didn’t have a panic attack because he wasn’t with his parents. People congratulate him. 

When Kavinsky is prompted to speak, he takes off his sunglasses. The skin around his eyes is mottled and dark and his nose is only slightly worse looking, bruised and painful. Broken. A few people hiss in sympathy, and Adam swiftly throttles his own misplaced sense of sympathy over the injury because Kavinsky doesn’t deserve it. The professor touches his nose in a gesture that seems slightly unconscious, but his expression is as blank as it’s been since the meeting started. 

“I didn’t relapse over break,” Kavinsky says. People murmur their support for the accomplishment. “But I couldn’t get out of bed for three days in a row, so, you know, baby steps. And his,” he points across the room to Adam, and everyone turns to look at him, “His boyfriend broke my fucking nose on Friday. So that kind of took a shit on my whole break.”

The whole room goes a little still and quiet. Professor Allen clears his throat. “I see you two know each other.”

“Not really,” Adam says at the same time Kavinsky says, “No shit.”

Gwen titters something Adam is reasonably sure is offensive and the professor quickly redirects the focus of the group to someone else who hasn’t had a chance to talk about their spring break yet. Adam tries to listen attentively, as it’s his first meeting and he knows his conflict resolution skills leave much to be desired, but the fact that both Kavinsky and Gwen keep looking at him sets him on edge in a way he hasn’t been in ages.

It seems like it takes hours for the hour long meeting to end. After Professor Allen reminds everyone that the next meeting is next Thursday, people start to pair off to chat and others filter out, Adam isn’t sure what he’s supposed to do while he waits to speak to the professor. He drifts to the edges of the room, away from everyone so he can continue observing them. He leans back against the shallow dressing counter, prepared to wait until the room is mostly empty before approaching Professor Allen, when he feels rather than hears someone hop up onto the counter beside him. He turns his head slightly and regrets it immediately.

“Unclench, Parrish,” Kavinsky says. He speaks with his hands, gesturing to the room and the other attendees grandly. “You’re among friends.”

Adam scoffs. “Am I really?”

Kavinsky shrugs and puts a cigarette between his lips. “I’m the only person you know here. It's damn close, isn't it?” He offers Adam his pack of cigarettes. Adam declines. Kavinsky tsks. “Hey, c’mon, don’t be like that. Think of it as a peace pipe or whatever.”

“How magnanimous.” 

“Don’t sound so surprised, man, I’m very magnanimous.” Kavinsky takes another cigarette out of the pack and tucks it into the chest pocket of Adam’s flannel shirt. 

Adam takes the cigarette out of his pocket and offers it to Kavinsky. “I don’t smoke.”

“Tightass.” He doesn’t take the cigarette back, so Adam has no choice but to pocket it again. Kavinsky seems pleased, if anything is truly capable of pleasing him, but maybe inconveniencing Adam is one of those rare things he genuinely enjoys. 

Adam crosses his arms. “What do you want, Kavinsky?”

“Same thing I always want, man. To be entertained. And I wanna talk to you, _mano a mano_. I mean, I’m being forced to,” he pauses, rolling his wrist as he thinks, face unreadable behind his sunglasses again, “Abdicate--see, I remember my SAT words, too--and I’m reluctant to do so, given the competition.” He gestures at Adam with his unlit cigarette. Adam’s sure he’d feel offended if he didn’t think as little of Kavinsky as Kavinsky thinks of him.

“We’re not competing,” Adam muses. “Ronan isn’t a prize to be won. He’s a person, and he made his choice.”

“Maybe. But have you made yours? I mean, isn’t your little friend right upstairs?” He points at the ceiling, where the actors upstairs are moving furniture or practicing their choreography, where Tad is. “And didn’t you see him just the other day while our mutual friend was denting my fucking face? I’m just wondering if that little date was before or after you went home and fucked Lynch stupid.”

Adam’s blood simmers in his veins, but he feels cold. He’s damned either way, no matter what he says, even if Kavinsky hadn’t laid the trap of this conversation like this. It’s hard to not feel manipulated, lead the way his parents would both find ways to twist his words and actions so they only ended up hurting him in the end, making him doubt his feelings and second-guess his thoughts. 

His fingernails are bitten too short to get any purchase on the skin of his upper arm but his grip is bruising enough to be punishing. Kavinsky’s eyebrows are interested over his sunglasses. His bruises are even worse up close, mottled and stark, violently purple and red, the blood pooled just under the surface of his skin. Distantly, Adam notices that he doesn’t seem pleased by the reaction he’s getting any more than he seems annoyed by it--if anything, he seems contemplative, and contemplative and Kavinsky are words that Adam’s mind can’t reconcile.

“Good talk.” Kavinsky pats Adam’s shoulder and slides off the counter. Adam catches his arm, his thumb overlapping his fingertips. For someone who takes up so much space in a room, for someone with such a substantial presence in Ronan’s life, Kavinsky is very insubstantial in person. Making sense of the frail arm in his hand and Kavinsky’s attendance at an abuse survivors’ meeting will take more time and thought than Adam can spare today.

At risk of damning himself, he says, “How do you know?”

Kavinsky pushes his sunglasses up into his hair to look Adam in the eye. Adam hates that he can’t meet the assessing, detached stare. Without breaking eye contact, Kavinsky wrenches his arm out of Adam’s grasp. A muscle works in his jaw, and it’s the only part of him that looks like the Kavinsky Adam knows, because the rest of him is a familiar stranger. The room feels knocked off its axis again.

“He’s real chatty, that kid.” The unlit cigarette finds its way between Kavinsky’s lips and he speaks around it, practiced. “See, he rooms with a friend of mine and he can’t shut up about you. It sure as shit isn’t your stupid alien face that’s like fag catnip, so all I can figure is that you must do something in bed that’s got our man Lynch and the kid upstairs so crazy.”

There isn’t anything that Kavinsky just said that doesn’t rankle Adam’s nerves. He narrows his eyes, critical and as cold as he can manage. “So, what? Are you fishing for tips?”

For a moment he’s sure Kavinsky is going to punch or tackle him, but then there’s a flicker of a smile, of a Kavinsky he recognizes. He releases a breath he didn’t realize he was holding--the possibility of being hit, so many years since he last was, was almost enough to shut Adam down completely. 

“You’re a piece of work, Parrish.” Kavinsky shakes his head and heads for the door, and this time Adam doesn’t stop him. 

\---

In the end, Professor Allen only keeps Adam for ten minutes, enough time to get Adam’s thoughts on the meeting and explain the rules, should Adam have desire to attend again and participate. When Adam is forced to admit that he can only hear on his right side, the professor offers to save a seat for Adam to place wherever he needs to to hear everything. 

“If you intend to come again,” the professor said, “There’s no obligation to come every time. Most people don’t, and not everyone speaks. Some people are comforted by hearing experiences similar to their own and begin to process and recover that way.” Adam left after that, unsure of whether or not he’ll be back in two weeks or if he’ll feel the need to say anything if he does return. Verbalizing that he was abused to Dr. Poldma is difficult enough, and that’s when they’re alone in her office; disclosing his most private and humiliating and painful memories to a group of relative strangers and Kavinsky is not exactly a thing Adam wants to do, but he also isn’t sure how supportive he’s able to be for anyone else otherwise. 

At some point in his life, Adam stopped being touched with kindness, and he’s somehow forgotten what that was like. The first time, after he’d left his parents’ trailer, that someone touched him without ill intent had earned them a visceral physical recoil and a very embarrassed, panicked Adam. The next time it happened, he’d leaned into it, braced for impact or rejection, and when neither came he’d all but sobbed with relief. It was water expelled from lungs after nearly drowning, the raw scrape and hunger for something vital that was easily taken for granted. It never upset him to touch someone else, and he actively sought it out when he could

Blue touched him freely and he devoured all that she had to give. At first, she’d understood that it was because he was starving for it, but his need was a famine that was running her resources fallow, causing droughts and shortages until, finally, she had to do something to combat the locust that was plaguing her.

She’d kissed Noah while she was still dating Adam. Adam didn’t know until after they’d broken up, and by then he couldn’t even be upset about it--Blue and Noah made sense in a way Blue and Adam never did, and, frankly, their relationship was largely beyond salvage by that point and they just hadn’t collected their things from each other’s apartments and said the words “it’s over” yet.

The long and short of it is that, somehow, being touched is still an experience that’s very emotionally charged for him. Where sex is emotional for other people because it reaffirms attraction or strengthens bonds, but for Adam it satiates his need and his desire and redirects his baser, worse impulses in a constructive way. It’s for him what boxing or swimming are to Ronan and Gansey. 

It had been much harder to swallow that Blue was also dating Gansey, because the thought that she’d gone from with Adam to with two of his best friends simultaneously was a significant blow to his ego, a fragile thing even on his best days.

_It’s not that just you wasn’t enough_ , she’d explained, _but they give me things you couldn’t._

_You never let me try to give you those things_ , he’d snapped.

She had been very unimpressed by his upset. _I like being in control, too, and you can’t let go and let me. I was your girlfriend, not a means of exorcising your demons._

She was not wrong.


	17. The One When Adam Can't Feel

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ronan, when he speaks again, is much closer than he was a moment ago. “Bullshit, Parrish. What’s wrong?”
> 
> Adam doesn’t feel where Ronan’s hand is on his arm. He also can’t quite make sense of why Ronan is so concerned. It’s nothing. Just a partial disconnect from his body, nothing worrisome like when his mind wanders off without him. “I’m fine, really. I’m just tired and I have work tonight.” He looks at Ronan’s hand. He looks at Ronan’s hand some more. It grips him a little tighter, and Adam looks at Ronan’s face instead. 
> 
> Ronan is giving him a look with the corners of his mouth and the space between his eyebrows turning down. It’s a look that says _you shouldn’t go to work like this_ Adam lifts his hand and taps the crease between Ronan’s eyebrows, and under his fingertip Ronan’s expression softens. Adam traces the shape of one of his dark eyebrows, his temple, the sharp angle of his cheekbone. He can barely, just barely, as if through a layer of cloth, feel the stubble on Ronan’s cheek. Adam exhales shakily. Relieved. He draws the shape of a constellation with Ronan’s freckles, lingering over a pale one near the corner of Ronan’s eye. Adam has never noticed it before.

June cannot come fast enough.

It is the third week of April, spring break is officially over, and Adam’s building is now re-populated and unbearably noisy again. Particularly the right side of the building. Only hearing on his right side is a limitation Adam has gotten used to --he doesn’t hit his head in the shower quite so much and he doesn’t try to use both headphones anymore-- but his neighbors to the right are a pair of girls who make an obscene amount of noise. One of them screams when she laughs, and she laughs a lot. The other one is a hysterical mess who’s always getting into shouting matches with her mother over the phone, and they talk multiple times a day. He had to re-arrange his entire apartment to get his bed off the right-hand wall within days of them moving in.

Their lease is up at the beginning of June. All of the leases in Adam’s building, aside from his own, are up at the beginning of June. 

June cannot come fast enough.

He’s been spending time in the soundproofed isolation rooms in the music wing of the library just to get a little reprieve since they moved in. It’s soothing to not have to hear anything but what he chooses to listen to, if anything, to not have other sounds competing for his attention aside from the ones he makes. It’s a peace Adam had forgotten he could know. He’s able to focus there in a way he can’t manage anywhere else but his studio space. 

The isolation booth is usually a reprieve but today, as it sometimes happens, it’s the not the vacation from the chaos in his building he’d been hoping for. He started getting lightheaded about half an hour into the block of time he reserved the room for, and the feeling seeped from his skull down his spine and into his limbs. The absence of other sounds around him is quickly worsening the disembodied feeling. 

If it wasn’t for the weight of his messenger bag on his shoulder, he might’ve run out of the building without returning the key to the booth.

Taking a shortcut through the park on the south side of campus gets Adam halfway back to his apartment while avoiding crossing Main Street. He’s across most of the grassy field where kids are playing tag and throwing frisbees and college students are laying out on picnic blankets when he sees Fletcher’s red hair near the swings on the playground. They never did have a chance to see each other over spring break and haven’t had class together yet this week. If Adam thought a brief visit to Fletcher’s apartment was weird and uncomfortable, running into him and his family in the park is probably even worse.

Adam’s manners tell him to pause and say hello, but his rapid loss of his extremities tells him to pretend he doesn’t see Fletcher at all and hurry home. He mostly succeeds and is almost past the huge wooden castle jungle gym beside the swings when, over the din of playing children, he hears Fletcher’s voice calling out to him.

“Adam, hey!” 

_God dammit_. Adam stops and turns around as the tall, dark haired guy standing next to Fletcher glances over at him. It takes Adam a moment to recognize Fletcher’s boyfriend, the baby’s father, whom he’s only met face-to-face once before several weeks ago. 

“Hi,” the boyfriend says. His name is something trade related, like Fletcher’s, as if they weren’t terminally a perfect couple in every other way already. Carver? That doesn’t sound right. Tanner? That doesn’t sound right, either.

“Hi.” Adam will not admit that he can’t remember Boyfriend’s name, manners be damned. Talking helps him remember himself, how he exists in space like other people do. It centers him. The performance of feeling fine may even convince him otherwise.

Fletcher makes the baby wave at Adam, and the baby goggles at him with huge green eyes. “Say hi to Adam. Can you say hi to Adam?” 

The baby does not say hi to Adam. The baby says “mbah” to Adam.

“He’s eight months old, kid,” Boyfriend says, fond but exasperated. He has a Texan accent, a looser and more subtle drawl than Adam’s twang. “He can’t say shit to anyone yet.”

Fletcher puts the baby into a swing. “Archer Hawk, watch your mouth around my son. For fuck’s sake.”

They smile at each other, in on some private joke Adam doesn’t know, but Adam is relieved to be reminded of Boyfriend’s name without needing to embarrass himself. The noise from the jungle gym escalates to creating a dull roar as a few more kids climb onto the structure, and Adam has to step around to the other side of the swing to avoid it. 

Adam hadn’t been a particularly fanciful child, so the appeal of jungle gyms and the company of other screaming kids has always been a little lost on him, but being within a handful of yards from at least a dozen kids of various ages is nearly infectious and he has a fleeting desire to climb on the monkey bars. It’s weird. He doesn’t think climbing on the monkey bars would be a particularly good idea considering he can’t feel his hands and his head feels like it’s full of helium. 

It’s not nearly as weird as the way the baby keeps staring at him. “Why is he looking at me like that?”

Archer gives the basket-shaped swing a gentle push. He never quite lets go of the place where his hand is on the seat of the baby’s swing, holding onto it with his fingertips, so the baby is never more than arm’s length from him. 

Adam wonders if either of his parents were ever so attentive to him when he was that small. He wonders what it’s like to be that small, if this baby even realizes how careful his father is being with him, if he understands how loved he is. Adam still doesn’t fully understand what being loved means and probably never will, but he has a capacity for it, he thinks. At the very least, he aches to have the capacity to love and be loved back, which is hopefully the same thing.

“Dunno,” Archer says. “Maybe he can tell you’re not one of his regular people. I’m not sure how well he can tell anyone apart yet.”

Fletcher looks up over his phone at them. “You don’t look or sound like either of us, he might be able to tell.” He taps at his phone’s screen and it makes a camera shutter noise. “Ronan confuses him, since he looks a little like Archer.” 

“Which one is he, now?” Archer asks. 

“Adam’s boyfriend.” Fletcher grabs one of the baby’s feet and makes him smile hugely at Adam. It’s toothless and a little drooly, which is probably cute to most people. To Adam, it just looks wet. And gummy. 

“Oh! Wait, is this the guy with the BMW or the one with the Camaro?”

“BMW.” Adam doesn’t think he’s so close to Gansey to be mistaken for being his boyfriend, but somehow the mistake is made somewhat regularly. It’s baffling. 

“I was gonna say that,” Fletcher says. He was not going to say that, because he can’t tell a new Mercedes from an old Hyundai, let alone Ronan’s BMW from Gansey’s Camaro. “The other one’s just his friend.”

“There’s a lot of guys to keep track of, huh, Jett?” Archer asks the baby, and the baby gurgles in response. Like Noah, Archer is closer to thirty than he is to twenty and seems especially adult with his son in his arms. Like Ronan, he’s tall and tattooed with black hair and blue eyes and seems especially kind when he kisses his son’s head. Adam is watching the baby--Jett, he corrects himself-- watch him. Jett smiles again when Adam awkwardly smiles back, how Jett gives him a toothless, damp smile when Adam waves at him. 

“Staring’s rude in this country, kid,” Archer says. Adam looks away from the baby to see that Fletcher is, in fact, staring at him.

Fletcher makes a dismissive gesture at him that makes Jett laugh and Archer huff a little. “You didn’t correct me about Ronan. Something happened, didn’t it? Over break?”

Adam shrugs and rubs his cheek against his shoulder rather than responding. Fletcher grins and attaches himself very firmly to Adam’s side. He’s remarkably strong, but Adam is too busy trying to squirm away from him to appreciate it. Archer doesn’t seem particularly moved to intervene on his boyfriend’s or Adam’s behalf, but he is laughing at them both, and Jett is laughing too, probably because his father is.

“Aw, look at him, he’s all red,” Fletcher says. “You bastard, I could kiss you.”

Adam finally pulls out of Fletcher’s grasp and steps away from him to right his shirt. His face is incredibly warm. “Please don’t. Kiss your boyfriend instead.”

Archer is lifting the baby out of the swing and balances him on his hip. “Not that I’d ever say no to that, but why am I being kissed?”

“Because,” Fletcher says, “Adam doesn’t want me to kiss him now that he’s stopped riding out, finally.”

“Stopped what, now?”

“Riding out. Faffing about, like. Wasting time.”

Adam didn’t expect Archer to know what he’d been wasting his time not doing, but he’s surprised when Archer doesn’t miss a beat and picks up the full context right away. “Such intrigue with these artsy kids, huh?” Jett makes a hiccuping sound and Archer bounces him a little. “It’s like a soap opera.”

Adam snorts. “One you’ve been watching, apparently.”

“Yeah, well, this one,” he nudges Fletcher with his shoe, “Doesn’t shut up about y’all sometimes. It’s like housewives and daytime TV. It’s his vacation from being a dad.”

“Oi, you were asking after them the other day, don’t act like it’s all just me gossiping.”

The notion that his personal life, particularly his love life, is a cause of such concern and discussion when Fletcher and Archer have so many more important things to be worrying about, sounds unbelievable. Adam is not a particularly interesting person. Ronan is interesting, but he’s also intensely private, as is Adam, but for very different reasons. But, Fletcher cares enough to talk about them to his boyfriend, and his Archer cares enough about his boyfriend’s friends, people he hardly knows, to be invested in them. 

“Something did happen,” he admits. “But we haven’t really talked about it. I don’t know what that means.”

Fletcher purses his lips. He’s also Ronan’s friend, which means that he’s somehow, in bits and pieces, put together a fairly complete picture of the situation that lacks the bias that Gansey and Noah and Blue all have, because he’s simply not as close to Adam and Ronan as they all are. Fletcher is new and he has a very busy and very adult life that the rest of them haven’t attained just yet. He clearly is deeply invested in them, but he can’t be even a fraction as involved with the five of them. 

He gives Adam’s shoulder a squeeze. Adam doesn’t quite feel its weight on him. “I’m happy for you both all the same.” He puts his hand on Archer’s arm. “We both are.”

“Thanks.” He checks the time on his phone. He only has two hours before work and he needs to try and ground himself before then, and he has to probably try several things before that happens. “I should get going, though.” 

“Yeah yeah, you’re just saying that because Jett making eyes at you is weirding you out,” Archer says. 

“Do you blame him, though?” Fletcher takes Jett from his father’s arms and kisses the top of his head. “Adam’s so pretty, isn’t he, Jett?” 

In a playfully wounded tone, Archer says, “I’m pretty, too. Pay attention to me.”

Fletcher narrows his eyes. “Spoiled you rotten, I have.”

“I’ll see you in class tomorrow,” Adam says. “Good seeing you, Archer. Bye, Jett.” The baby gives him another damp smile and flails one of his arms as Adam leaves him with his playfully bickering fathers.

It’s getting harder to acknowledge the unpleasant floating sensation as he walks the rest of the way home. Being up to his elbows in the innards of cars in a few hours while feeling like a marionette on slack strings doesn’t sound like a night he wants to have, but he can’t count on the sensation passing in a timely manner. 

Maybe recopying his notes for Greenmantle’s seminar will help. The tedium of putting his class notes into his studying notebooks can take hours between transcribing his recordings of his classes and deciphering his cramped, frantic scrawl from his class notes. He can try taking a shower and eating, too. Maybe a short nap if he can manage to actually fall asleep, or another cup of coffee and an aspirin or two. Blue used to tell him to try yoga when he was anxious and all that ever did was make him feel out of shape and stiff, but that’s always an option, too. He thinks he remembers enough to make the half-hearted attempt if it might help.

There are a few of his neighbors sitting on the steps next to the door leading upstairs. They’re smoking and they have the door propped open, but they shift out of his way to let him inside. The smoke, which normally doesn’t bother him, makes his eyes water. 

Ronan is draped over the futon with a sketchbook when Adam lets himself into his apartment. Normally, lately, this wouldn’t be a problem, but needing to perform feeling completely fine for Ronan is not a thing Adam wants to do. Robotically, he goes through the motions of stepping out of his sneakers, of putting his keys on the cart next to the bathroom door, of dropping his bag near his desk, of going to his coffee maker to pour himself a cup. 

He looks up and watches as Ronan pulls his headphones down around his neck and points at the wall across the room. “If that bitch shrieks about being a fuck-up one more time I’m going to evict her my-fucking-self.”

“She’ll be fine in, like, ten minutes.” It takes a phenomenal amount of concentration to get his coffee from the kitchenette to his desk. Once it’s safely set on the coffee-ringed CD case he uses as a coaster, Adam has to deliberately presses his palms to his desk and bear his weight down on them as he sits, because the floating sensation has evolved into partial numbness, without the pins and needles feeling. “You know it’s Tuesday. She’s always a fuck-up on Tuesdays.”

“She’s not usually so repetitive about it.” Ronan frowns. “You okay?”

There is no adequate response for that. It’s not even unusual or disconcerting anymore now that he’s home--it’s just another one of the weird Adam-isms that he’s grown accustomed to over the last few years. Like the nightmares and the mood swings and the occasional hollow tin feeling in his chest and not always recognizing himself in the mirror or in photographs. “I’m fine.”

Ronan, when he speaks again, is much closer than he was a moment ago. “Bullshit, Parrish. What’s wrong?”

Adam doesn’t feel where Ronan’s hand is on his arm. He also can’t quite make sense of why Ronan is so concerned. It’s nothing. Just a partial disconnect from his body, nothing worrisome like when his mind wanders off without him. “I’m fine, really. I’m just tired and I have work tonight.” He looks at Ronan’s hand. He looks at Ronan’s hand some more. It grips him a little tighter, and Adam looks at Ronan’s face instead. 

Ronan is giving him a look with the corners of his mouth and the space between his eyebrows turning down. It’s a look that says _you shouldn’t go to work like this_. Adam lifts his hand and taps the crease between Ronan’s eyebrows, and under his fingertip Ronan’s expression softens. Adam traces the shape of one of his dark eyebrows, his temple, the sharp angle of his cheekbone. He can barely, just barely, as if through a layer of cloth, feel the stubble on Ronan’s cheek. Adam exhales shakily. Relieved. He draws the shape of a constellation with Ronan’s freckles, lingering over a pale one near the corner of Ronan’s eye. Adam has never noticed it before.

“It’s a scar.” Ronan can apparently read his mind.. “Chicken pox. I have a few of those.”

Adam never had chicken pox. He somehow got lucky because he hadn’t had friends to catch them from in grade school, which probably means he’s going to catch them someday as an adult and will want to skin himself. 

“What was it like?” he asks.

Ronan shifts from crouching beside Adam’s desk chair to sitting on the floor. He rests his head against Adam’s knee. “Declan had them first, I got them from him. I ended up in the hospital with mine because they started spreading too close to my eyes. Lucky bastard was over them in a week.”

Adam tries to imagine it, the smaller and softer Ronan with thick black curls he’s seen in pictures, covered in pink smears of calamine lotion, pouting because his big brother was already over the virus. It makes him smile. He smooths his hand over Ronan’s hair. I’s long, long enough to actually be dark hair rather than the suggestion of dark hair. It softens his face, marginally, and even brutally short it’s thick. “Growing it out?”

Ronan shrugs. “Thinking about it. Sargent keeps talking about getting an undercut and I thought we could match.”

“It would be nice to see those curls of yours in person someday,” Adam agrees. Ronan turns his head a little to look up at him. Adam gently tugs at a few strands and Ronan swats him away. When Adam’s move to pull away comes slightly delayed, Ronan lifts his head. 

Adam isn’t sure what to do with his hand now, so he places it in his lap. Ronan’s eyes narrow. He shifts from sitting to kneeling and leans in close to Adam’s face, as if he can see the dissociation as it’s happening play out across Adam’s features. He can’t, because it’s not that kind of episode. This is the kind that usually no one notices or Adam can power through, but the stress of the support group caught up with him suddenly and swiftly and he can’t mask it.

Adam blinks at the furrow in his brow. “It’ll pass. I’m fine, really, it’ll be over if I can stop dwelling on it and making it worse.”

Ronan’s eyes narrow a little more, almost accusatory. “What is it?”

“It’s just--” Adam doesn’t make a point of mentioning these episodes because he knows that, in a way, they’re more upsetting for the people around him if they know about it. It’s easy to see when he’s emotionally absent or mentally elsewhere, but seeing him present and not quite occupying his body properly is probably more than a little jarring. But Ronan is waiting for an answer and he’ll reject a lie if he’s offered one. So, Adam doesn’t lie. “I can’t feel my body.”

“What?” Ronan seems alarmed by this, but he does a good job minimizing it for Adam’s benefit. “What do you mean?”

“I can’t feel it. It happens all the time, it’s just bad right now.” 

On the other side of the wall, Adam’s hysterical neighbor slams the bathroom door and wails loudly that her mother isn’t listening to her. It’s entirely likely that she isn’t, but it’s also entirely likely that his hysterical neighbor is imagining slights where there aren’t any, because she screamed about her favorite show ending on a cliffhanger last night for an hour and her roommate spent the night someplace else and she called her mother to scream about that for a while, too.

Ronan takes Adam’s face in his hands and looks him in the eye, and Adam has no choice but to meet his gaze. Ronan’s face is uncharacteristically open, earnest even, as he searches Adam’s face. His thumbs cup the curve of Adam’s cheekbones, and Adam wishes he could feel them rubbing over the bone. “What brings it on?”

Adam shrugs. “Stress, usually, sometimes nothing.”

“Stress,” Ronan repeats

“Yeah.” Everything. Nothing. Only some things. “Just the usual.”

“Life, the universe, and everything, huh?”

Adam smiles despite himself. “Yeah, basically. You know me so well.”

Ronan drops his hands to rest on Adam’s thigh and his gaze goes with them. “I like to think I do. But I don’t, I didn’t know about this.”

“I didn’t want anyone to know about it,” Adam admits. He shrugs when Ronan looks up again. It’s more frequent than other ways he dissociates, but it’s seldom as severe as it is today and seldom comes on without warning while he’s fairly relaxed in public, but these things happen. His head is such a tangled, furious mess it’s a small wonder that he’s not a disaster like the girl in the next apartment. 

No, he is a disaster, just not in such a loud, obvious way. 

“I saw Fletcher and the baby today. They were at the park when I was heading back here from the library.” Ronan doesn’t seem particularly interested in this, apart from Adam talking about it, so Adam continues. “His boyfriend got you and Gansey confused.”

Ronan laughs, just once. “Seems fair. You’re always with one of us and Gansey’s pretty gay for you.”

“He totally is, right? If I ever gave him the green light I’m pretty sure he’d jump me.”

“Yeah, him and the rest of the world. You’re Bella Swan, to know you is to be madly in love with you.” Realizing what he just said, Ronan clams up instantly and is back on the other side of the room, posture defensive and closed off. Adam stares at him, and as suddenly as he’d lost sensation in his skin, it comes back, slamming into him like a Mack truck. He only knows because his heart twinges painfully and his throat feels like it’s closing off his air supply. 

Ronan’s red from his hair down under his shirt and is very resolutely not looking up from his sketchbook. He’s not doing anything but staring at it. Adam looks away from him, nauseous and slick-palmed, and gets his things out of his bag. 

He’s barely started recopying his notes when he hears Ronan get up and leave.


	18. The One With the Countdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Noah looks at Ronan and says, very carefully, “I wasn’t with him this morning.”
> 
> Ronan was. He woke up tangled in Adam’s cheap sheets, sticky with Adam’s sweat, lightly scratched from Adam’s stubble, listening to Adam’s light snoring. They woke up and had coffee and Adam watched the news and did some of his homework while Ronan ate their leftover pizza from last night. They made out against the kitchen counter before Adam left, for what Ronan assumed was a morning class. 
> 
> But Adam doesn’t have class before noon on Thursdays. Ronan can’t believe he didn’t remember that earlier.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back and didn't abandon this fic, but I'm sure you'll both understand why this took so long and wish that I had abandoned it by the time you get to the end. Whoops.

Seven days have passed since Easter, and the learning curve is flattening a little more with each passing day. As it turns out, they’d blurred so many lines with each other before they kissed that the progression from friends to something-more-than-friends to we-haven’t-put-a-label-on-it-yet has been fairly smooth. It’s also rewarding, in a way, to get to learn all the secret little intimacies of someone you never thought you’d have a chance with. 

Except for the time on Tuesday night when Ronan accidentally kneed Adam in the groin, because Adam had the audacity to touch the back of his knee. Ronan has a feeling he’ll be paying for that for the rest of his life. 

That isn’t to say that it’s easy, because it isn’t, but it’s definitely rewarding. A week and a lot of furious making out, dry-humping, and heavy petting does not make up for the last two years or overwrite their boundaries with each other, but the uncharted territory feels familiar and safe. Every new discovery feels like a victory, and every time Adam discovers something about him Ronan decides he never wants the game to end.

They have yet to decide, or even talk about, what exactly they were doing together, so if they’re dating or messing around or were in the early stages of nesting was anyone’s guess. Ronan knows what he wants, and he is certain that Adam understands what Ronan wants, but neither of them are sure what Adam himself wants. If Adam wants them to be dating, Ronan will be delighted to date him. If Adam wants them to nest, Ronan will be ecstatic. If Adam doesn’t want to define things yet, Ronan is perfectly content to continue putting off the discussion indefinitely. If Adam is more interested in messing around, Ronan will be glad to get whatever he can from Adam while it lasts, if it lasts, and he will try to prepare his heart for the nuclear fallout of when it ends.

It is proving to be much harder than he thought it would be to temper himself to not send Adam running screaming away from him because Ronan wants and needs things from him that he isn’t, or may not ever be, prepared to give him. He is skittish best and emotionally detached at worst, and he’s not always demonstrative of his feelings, no matter how strong they are.

Ronan knows he fucked up. He accidentally let the L-word slip and that is the absolute last thing he needed to do. Putting that sentiment out there not even a week in, even after obviously pining and making overtures for two years, is so pointlessly stupid he almost expected it to have scared Adam off completely. It doesn’t matter that Ronan has been in love with him for so fucking long, because Adam clearly doesn’t feel the same way. 

Fortunately it’s easy to pretend that he’d never said anything about loving Adam, because he’s learning so much about him and Adam is learning so much about him.

Adam’s deaf ear is an absolute no-go and Ronan’s secretly ticklish knees are now off-limits, too. Adam prefers to be on top and Ronan doesn’t feel strongly either way unless Adam’s holding his hands above his head, in which case Ronan definitely prefers being under him. Adam bites, hard, whenever he thinks he can get away with it. Ronan’s entire body gets so sensitive after he comes he can hardly stand for Adam to touch him afterwards, even though he always wants Adam’s hands on him. Adam has an unrepentantly filthy mouth and Ronan’s vocal. Adam’s always trying to pull Ronan’s hair and makes the exact same frustrated, sexy sound every single time he remembers that he can’t, and Ronan finally gets to kiss Adam’s hands and suck on his fingers.

“I don’t know why you’re so into this,” Adam tells him one night.

Ronan grazes his teeth over one of Adam’s knuckles before drawing back from it. “Do you want me to stop?”

“No. It’s just weird.” He makes a face and tries to discreetly wipe his hand on his jeans. “Your hand fetish is baffling.”

Ronan throws himself onto his side beside Adam with a massive sigh. The futon frame creaks in protest. “Says the kinky motherfucker who said he wanted to tie me to the bed the last night.”

Adam flushes, his ears going vibrantly, adorably pink. “I can’t be held responsible for the shit I say in the heat of the moment. And you came, like, instantly, and so hard you almost cried. You were totally into it, don’t lie.”

“I never lie,” Ronan says primly. He ignores the fact that his face is getting warm. 

“Is that your way of telling me you want me to tie you down?” Adam makes a thoughtful sound and reclines against his pillows and the couch cushions. He smiles, just a little, and it’s an expression he seems to have learned from Ronan. “Because that can be arranged.”

Ronan shoves his hip. “Freak.”

Adam’s smile grows. 

They haven’t had sex yet. It feels like they’re not quite ready for that step yet, as often they skirt that line, because, in a way, it still feels too huge. Too intimate. This is easier and simpler, and they both seem just fine with that. Sex and all the trappings, as far as Ronan is concerned, does not live up to the hype and is never as good as one hopes it will be. There are too many awkward and inconvenient and, frankly, kind of gross additional steps to keep it from ever being as spontaneous as he’d expected it to be, as he’d been made to assume it would be, because the mechanics of two guys is not at all as straightforward as a man and a woman. And the negotiations of sexual politics isn’t exactly the most comfortable or simple conversation to have, either. 

It would be so nice if they can make due with hands for a while longer. 

“There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” Adam is saying. Ronan isn’t sure he’s comforted by the lingering smile on his face. “Something I’ve never tried before.”

“Vague,” Ronan muses. 

Adam nudges him. “Shut up. It’s something normal, or like, not weird or anything. I just realized the other day that I’ve never blown anyone before and that I kinda like you’ll be my first.”

Ronan’s apprehension dissolves slightly. He turns more towards Adam. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Adam sits up and both of his knees touch Ronan’s thigh. “I mean, like, I’ve liked other guys. I’ve looked at other guys and wondered what that would be like. And for a while I didn’t think it would ever be you at all, but I’m real glad it will be.”

Sometimes he wonders if Adam’s okay with waiting, or if he’ll realize sex with another guy is just too complicated and he’ll decide it’s not something he’s interested in after all, or if he’ll realize he’s not still attracted to Ronan once sex becomes a part of the equation and he’ll want someone else instead, or any of another million things Ronan is secretly terrified will happen. 

It would be so nice if they can make due with hands for a while longer. 

\---

It was a complete accident that Ronan found the one and only picture that still exists of Adam when he was younger. Out of curiosity, he’d been looking online to try and find out more about Henrietta, the tiny town Adam had grown up in; Ronan had never been there, and he’d always known it existed, but the most that Henrietta had to offer anyone was literally nothing but hiking deeper into Appalachia and proximity to even smaller towns that had nothing to offer but “paddle faster I hear banjos” jokes and crystal meth. 

It was an old school district website, with archived yearbooks for the graduated classes. Ronan clicked on the link to the PDF of the 2012 yearbook, then clicked through until he found Adam Parrish, valedictorian. Adam Parrish, National Honor Society member and AP student. Adam Parrish, student council treasurer. Adam Parrish, tutor, debate team member. Adam Parrish, with no quote and no senior picture.

There hadn’t been a smiling senior portrait of him like there was for the other ninety-four kids that had graduated with him, and the blank space occupied by a picture of the school’s raven mascot wasn’t glaring because there were several others that way, and even a few without quotes, too. It was, however, the only one missing both, blank aside from Adam’s name and his club affiliations.

Ronan kept clicking through the yearbook to keep himself from throwing his laptop across the room.

Like most yearbooks, even Henrietta’s tiny graduating class had their baby pictures featured after the last page of 2012 graduates. Lots of embarrassing pictures of babies in onesies and sitting in plastic pools and portraits of uncomfortable looking toddlers with names like Jedediah and Charity Leigh. Some of the pictures were of slightly older kids, maybe kindergarten age, and Ronan almost clicked past it when he noticed the name he’s been looking for, next to a girl named Brandy.

Adam. 

Ronan’s heart seized. He opened the picture in another tab and zoomed in until he cropped out the little girl. He wonders if Adam even knows this picture exists, because even though his childhood had been despicable, Adam has lamented not having pictures of himself when he was a kid. He was one of those kids that you could almost tell what they’d grow up to look like--his nose is still the same shape but more defined now, his hair has gotten a darker but he still wears it the same way, his eyebrows were fair then and still fair now. He had freckles and a little smudge of dirt on the side of his face. In the picture, he’s looking at the girl, crouched down on pavement in front of her with his hands to his mouth, just barely covering his tiny smile with dirty fingers. There’s a Spongebob bandaid on his knee.

Ronan saves the image and drops it into Photoshop just to crop it properly and save the resolution of the image. The printer in the living room noisily clicks and whirs to life when he exports the file to it, and unfortunately the noise draws Noah’s attention and he gets to it first.

Noah’s wearing the stupid glittery green glasses again and an electric blue tiger-striped bathrobe that might be one of Blue’s over his boxers. He frowns at the picture when he hands it to Ronan.

“Your creep factor just skyrocketed, you know,” he says.

 

Ronan snatches the picture from him. “Whatever, cradle robber.”

Noah huffs, offended. “Ow, papercuts. Why are you cyberstalking your boyfriend?”

“Because I wanted to make a hit list of his ex-girlfriends. Think Sargent’s stepdad will hook me up?”

“He’s not her stepdad. Yet.” Noah looks at the picture of Adam again. “He was so cute. Cuter than you, anyway. How could…” He trails off, letting the sentence wither and die as he crosses his arms over his chest. Ronan doesn’t know how, either, but he knows that the rest of that thought doesn’t need to be said. How anyone, no matter how loathsome, could look at a child and want to hurt them does something to his insides that makes him want to commit arson. How someone could’ve looked at Adam when he was this young and hated him makes Ronan feel destructive and ill. Someone else looked at Kavinsky when he was that age and hated him, too. 

Ronan doesn’t understand human evil, except for that it’s unfortunately very real.

“I think he’ll like it,” Noah says after a long moment passes. Ronan hadn’t been fishing for that affirmation, but getting it is validating. It’s not him being presumptuous. It’s just a nice thing, which no one ever expects Ronan to do. 

\---

Ten days have passed since Easter. Ten days of not talking about it, of getting caught and made to confess, of finally getting to kiss and touch and not needing to beat around the bush. Ten days. Almost two weeks. Almost-two-weeks is hardly a good measure of time for the duration of anything, so Ronan knows better than to get his hopes up.

Adam needs to shave but Ronan doesn’t want him to; finding out that Adam is generally less clean-shaven than he looks was a delightful surprise Ronan doesn’t think he’ll ever tire of. He’s half-sitting and half-leaning on the counter of his kitchenette, quite preoccupied by Ronan’s mouth on his own, and Ronan is equally preoccupied by how one of Adam’s legs between his, how his hands are resting on Ronan’s hips. 

The combination of Adam’s tongue in his mouth and the warmth of his hands is catastrophic, a meteor strike of want and fear and satisfaction and incaution all at once. A thought occurs to him, and once lodged in his mind Ronan cannot shake it, nor does he want to, because he knows the only way to shake it will be to act on it.

Ronan Lynch is a man of action. So he acts. “Can I give you something?”

Adam’s brow creases. “Give me something?” He crease gets a little more pronounced for a second, then it vanishes as his eyebrows raise. “Like head?”

“Why.” Ronan shakes Adam very gently, and Adam laughs. “Why is that the first thing you thought of.”

“Nine and half months, Ronan.” He has the audacity to be entirely unembarrassed. “Does that tell you anything?”

“Only that you’re horny as shit.” He slides his hands down from Adam’s shoulders to his hands. “I have something to give you. And no, it didn’t cost anything, but it’s something you should have.” Adam eyes him warily, trying to suss out any ulterior motives he suspects Ronan might have. He doesn’t like being told what he should have, but Ronan doesn’t see how this could backfire once he gives Adam the picture. “Can I?”

“I guess.” Adam crosses his arms, starting to close himself off in his uncertainty. Ronan can feel his eyes on him as he gets the picture out of his bag where it had been carefully pressed flat in his laptop. Adam doesn’t open back up when Ronan returns to him, and he’s looking at the paper like he expects it to attack him. He hesitates to take it, and again before he unfolds the blank half of the paper it’s printed on to reveal the picture.

The complete lack of reaction is not what Ronan expected, but he realizes now, as he leans on the fridge across from Adam, that he hadn’t known what to expect. But silence makes Ronan wonder if this had been a good idea at all.

 

“Is that…” Adam starts and trails off as he struggles with the words. He leans more heavily on the counter. “Who is this?”

That Adam doesn’t recognize himself makes Ronan’s heart sink. “It’s you.”

The faint line between Adam’s eyebrows becomes more pronounced as he visibly struggles to accept it as truth. He touches the picture with his fingertips, but he’s gripping the blank half of the paper to sightly it starts to crinkle in his hand. He doesn’t seem angry, just frustrated or upset. Ronan doesn’t blame him, but he’s never quite sure how to handle some of Adam’s less rage-based bursts of emotion. 

“I remember this,” Adam says, after a long moment passes. He’s even smiling a little when he looks up, and Ronan releases a breath he hadn’t realized he was holding. “How did you even find it?”

Ronan shrugs. “It was in your yearbook. I found it online.” Adam gives him a strange, considering look. “It was an accident, I swear.”

“Yeah, okay.” Ronan feels himself smile a little, despite himself. Adam smooths out wrinkles he’d made before he folds the blank excess behind the picture and puts it on his fridge with the only magnet he has. Ronan’s chest feels stuffed full, threatening to break his ribs, as he looks at Adam looking at himself. 

He bumps his shoulder against Adam’s to get his attention. Wordlessly, when Adam glances at him, Ronan asks was that okay?

Adam nods. Yeah. It is. He leans back on the counter and sighs heavily. “I mean, it’s no blowjob or anything, but whatever.” He smiles, elastic and genuine, and Ronan bumps against him again, a little harder.

“Asshole,” Ronan says.

“You love me,” Adam replies, light and teasing, like a joke, but something about his expression is complicated. He doesn’t look like he wants to have this confirmed. 

Ronan forces a heavy sigh. “I’m never gonna live that down, am I?”

Adam knows him better than to accept his act that it had been an innocent, inconvenient slip-up, but he still seems relieved by it. “Not if I can help it.”

Ronan bites the inside of his cheek until he can taste blood. 

\---

It is so gloriously nice out that Ronan can’t stand the thought of being indoors. It’s warm but not hot and it almost reminds him of home, and, because he’s feeling nostalgic, he goes to the tennis courts on campus instead of the gym uptown. Swinging a racket pulls his muscles in a way they haven’t been pulled in months. The thump of the ball against the net is so much more satisfying than the rebound of it off a racquetball court walls. Hearing birds and cars and kids and other students is invigorating. 

For Ronan, being able to do this is the first real sign of spring. That and Gansey’s birthday, and the two usually coincide during years with good weather. This year they’re only a day apart because it’s been a very good year.

He still needs to buy something, because Gansey did not appreciate how Ronan wore a bow on his head and said his friendship was Gansey’s gift last year. Blue told him to go to the liquor store up near the supermarket and get Gansey something old mannish, which isn’t a bad idea, but it could also be sorely tempting to buy something--or several somethings--for himself. 

He hasn’t had a drink in fifteen days. He doesn’t want to risk the temptation when this thing with Adam is still too new to stand up to one of Ronan’s legendary fuck-ups. 

“I have faith in you,” Noah says from across the court. He’s on the other side of the fence, keeping Ronan company while he and his intern go over something for one of Noah’s classes. The intern barely looks old enough to be in college. “Just stay away from the whiskey.”

Ronan grunts and hits the ball at the fence. 

Noah doesn’t flinch from it but the intern jumps. “Scaring teenagers is clearly the better option, though. Obviously. Duh.”

“Isn’t it always?” the intern asks. His voice is still high, as if he really isn’t old enough for college yet. Noah would be the kind of person to get landed with a prepubescent genius to help him. 

“This is the opposite of helpful.” They both glance over at Ronan as he goes to retrieve the ball from where it landed. “Do you even know what he likes?”

Noah is a portrait of innocence. “I do not condone underage drinking.”

The intern frowns. “Says the guy with a mostly empty bottle of schnapps in his desk.”

“I am very much not underage, and you should not know about that, you snitching fetus.” To Ronan, he says, “It’s not like you can go cheap and just give him, like, Fleishman’s or something, like you would do for literally any other person on their 21st birthday.”

“It doesn’t have to be booze, does it?” the intern asks. He sounds hesitant, a little distasteful. “Is that a thing you guys do on birthdays?” Ronan can’t remember being so young and unaccepting of liquor as a perfectly good and always appropriate birthday gift. A small part of his brain that sounds a little like Adam and a lot like Gansey tells him it’s because he was a teenage alcoholic.

Noah pats the intern’s head. “Someday, grasshopper, when you’re older, you’ll understand.”

“I do understand. I just--I can’t buy it. For a gift, I mean, not for another two years. Well, one and a half years, I’ll be twenty in September. But that’s still a few months away, so...”

Ronan clucks his tongue. “Sounds like someone’s fishing for a boot.” When he glances over at them, Noah is nodding like he was thinking the same thing. “Kids these days, man.”

Noah shrugs his college sweatshirt over his head and flashes his intern and Ronan most of his ghostly white torso. He tugs his tie-dyed tank back into place and drops the bright blue sweatshirt on his folding chair. “Ro, wanna go singles?”

Ronan shrugs and goes to collect the balls again. The fence around the court rattles as Noah lets himself in, and the intern grumbles to himself and starts to collect their things into some semblance of order. Noah gets the spare racket from Ronan’s bag and twirls it around, testing its weight and giving it a few test swings. Noah is better at this than Adam and worse than Gansey but not quite as good as Blue, but they’re all poor opponents because none of them have ever played tennis seriously like Ronan has. The only person he’s ever had a decent match with since quitting the team was Henry Cheng, but they aren’t exactly friendly enough to play a couple of matches more often. 

The intern is leaning forward, watching them curiously. Ronan feels a tingle of recognition. Why does he feel like he’s seen this kid before?

“I’ll keep score,” the intern says. “Can I play the winner?”

Ronan snorts. “Your funeral.”

“My grandpa likes gin,” the intern says after a handful of volleys, responding to their earlier conversation. Ronan’s up by thirty-love. “If you don’t wanna go scotch or whatever.”

Noah points at the intern with his racket. “That’s actually a good idea.”

“Nobody asked him,” Ronan snaps. Just thinking about gin makes his stomach churn. That was Proko’s drink. 

“Be nice to Tad, he’s my only competent intern this year and I love him.”

 

Tad. Tad. Why does that sound familiar?

“I’ll take it!” Intern Tad laughs. 

Ronan serves the ball and tries to remember if he’s met this intern or heard Noah talk about him before. 

Maybe Adam has a better idea of what to get Gansey for his birthday. Maybe, if Adam hasn’t gotten anything yet, they could go in on something together. Is that weird? Is that too serious since they’re only just--only just what? Seeing each other? Dating? Is going in on splitting a gift with someone something friends even do?

Relationships are weird.

It’s not a relationship, is it? It is, though, even if they haven’t decided what to call it yet, right? Even though they haven’t attempted to call it anything at all?

“Has Gansey even said what he wanted to do, or is it just the usual with gifts and vegan cupcakes?” Noah asks. “I figured he would’ve said something to one of us, and Blue hasn’t mentioned anything.”

“No clue.” Ronan takes a few steps back to swing backhanded. “What about his other other halves?”

“I don’t know about Henry, but Adam definitely would’ve said something if he knew anything.”

Ronan shrugs and goes to collect the balls again. “Probably, but he’s been weird lately. Spacy. Did you notice?”

“Isn’t he always?” Noah asks. At the same time, Tad the Intern says, “He seemed okay this morning.”

Ronan looks at him, then at Noah. The ball catches in the net after an aborted swing sends it there. Noah’s eyes are huge behind his sunglasses. Tad the Intern blinks at both of them, puzzled by their surprise. “What? We had breakfast today. He didn’t say anything to you guys?”

Noah looks at Ronan and says, very carefully, “I wasn’t with him this morning.”

Ronan was. He woke up tangled in Adam’s cheap sheets, sticky with Adam’s sweat, lightly scratched from Adam’s stubble, listening to Adam’s light snoring. They woke up and had coffee and Adam watched the news and did some of his homework while Ronan ate their leftover pizza from last night. They made out against the kitchen counter before Adam left, for what Ronan assumed was a morning class. 

But Adam doesn’t have class before noon on Thursdays. Ronan can’t believe he didn’t remember that earlier. He throws his tennis racket across the court and stalks off without his things, leaving Noah and Tad the Intern to pick up after him.

Tad the Intern is the freshman Adam’s been hanging around with for the last month. 

\---

Adam is pissed just as the clock turns over to the sixteenth day. Not so pissed that he leaves, but still pissed. It’s almost satisfying. Almost. 

“I don’t know where y’all get off,” he snaps, “Assuming that I’m incapable of being friends with someone without wanting to fuck them.”

“It’s true, isn’t it?” Ronan asks him. 

Adam flushes dark with anger, his eyes burning, and he throws his hands up. He’s a lot more animated when he’s this infuriated, Ronan’s noticed. “I never wanted to fuck Gansey or Noah or Henry. It’s not the same.”

It isn’t, because Tad the Intern wants Adam the way Ronan wants Adam, the way Blue wanted Adam once. On the other side of the apartment, Adam’s phone rings on the kitchen counter, loud, the way Adam’s phone always rings. They both look at it. The argument is suspended, a specimen in a jar, astronauts in the vacuum of space, a diver in the void. Adam goes to it, but his back is turned and Ronan can’t tell what he must be thinking until after he sets the phone back down. He does it gently, which either means he’s trying to not be angry or he’s just not anymore.

“I’m real tired of everyone acting like I’m going to fuck this up like I can’t do right by you,” Adam says. “Just because I’ve only dated girls before doesn’t mean I’ll cheat on you with one, or with some other guy because he can’t talk to me without making a pass. I’m not the one who cheated.”

Ronan blinks. “I know.”

“So why are you so freaked out about me hanging out with Tad?” Adam asks. He still hasn’t turned around. 

Ronan blinks again. “I don’t know.”

Adam’s face is unreadable, which is to say it’s his usual, slightly terse expression when he finally turns. The phone vibrates on the counter behind him rather than chiming. “Is it because I didn’t tell you? Like your thing about lying?”

“Maybe,” Ronan admits. He rubs his hands over his head and fleetingly wants to shave it as he touches the longer bristle of his hair under his palms. Noah told him once that he’s a real prick when he’s jealous, and he’s trying not to be, because Adam won’t be charmed by that kind of possessiveness, that fearful clinginess, the suffocating want. “I don’t know, Adam. It just bothers me. A lot. I don’t want it to, but it does.”

Adam laughs once. It sounds like forgiveness or understanding. He turns his phone off. 

\---

On the eighteenth day, Ronan sees Kavinsky and tells him in no uncertain terms that they can’t hang out anymore, because of the things that always seem to happen when they hang out. Kavinsky is, unsurprisingly, furious, but in a way that’s colder and somehow more threatening because of his sobriety-induced misery.

Adam tells Ronan that he made sure Tad the Intern knew that things would never happen between them, because Adam is with Ronan. Tad the Intern was understandably upset, but had already assumed and resigned himself to the loss with a maturity that one seldom finds in lovestruck nineteen-year-olds.

\---

Fine arts, as a field of study, is liberally sprinkled with dicks. Ronan has been looking at his own for the last twenty-one years and, in more recent years, he’s seen other people’s in person and on his laptop screen. None of this feels like it had adequately prepared him for this moment. He is probably very biased in thinking that Adam’s is easily the most attractive one he’s ever seen, and he’s not typically of the mind that dicks are attractive at all. 

Seeing it is very unlike touching it, and somehow exactly the same. 

“You’re so…” Ronan trails off, unable to decide how he wants to finish that thought. Perfect, gorgeous, sexy, like a dream, unreal. He clears his throat. 

Adam chuckles above him. “You’re already in my pants, you don’t have to flatter me.”

It is the twentieth day and their fight earlier this week feels like a bad, half-remembered dream. Neither of them have brought it up again, but they’re good at that kind of avoidance by now, especially with each other. 

All the ways he imagined this day would come, not once did Ronan think they’d be crowded into the corner of Adam’s dingy little kitchen, wedged into the tight space between the counter and the fridge. He can’t imagine it happening anyplace else, in any other way. There won’t be any un-doing this once it happens, and they’re both going to have to live with the fact that Ronan has sucked Adam off for the rest of their lives, no matter what happens.

Ronan both wants this more than he wants to breathe and he doesn’t want it at all, and the disparity is painful inside his body. Ultimately it was his decision to offer this, his decision to follow through, and his decision to get on his knees to worship Adam the way Adam deserves to be worshipped--that doesn’t stop the nagging, endless guilt, as it has never silenced the voice in the back of his head that sounds a lot like Declan that always reminds him that he’s somehow fucking up what their parents built for them. 

There’s another voice in Ronan’s head that sounds like his own and that one wonders if he’s going to burn in Hell for getting on his knees for anyone other than God and for anything but prayer. He hates that voice more than he hates the Declan one.

Adam’s skin is so soft and hot it’s impossible to not want to touch him. His hand on the back of Ronan’s head grips him tightly because there’s not enough hair to pull yet, but he doesn’t push Ronan down or force himself forward. 

That he bears this in silence is infuriating in a way that makes Ronan want to pry his voice out of him, but the way he bites his lip is almost sexy enough to make up for it. 

Adam returns the favor, once he’s adequately recovered from the breaking of his nearly ten month long dry spell, and what he lacks in experience he makes up for in enthusiasm, attentiveness to Ronan’s reactions, and what might just be sheer dumb luck and natural talent. Ronan is so unbelievably happy for once that he dozes off almost immediately afterwards, content and sated and delighting in how much of his skin is touching Adam’s. 

A good mood for Ronan Lynch is not the effusive cheeriness other people experience, but a quiet and contented feeling not unlike sleeping on the floor in a patch of sun in the middle of the afternoon like a housecat. It’s a peaceful, centered feeling he’s almost forgotten. He is in a very good mood.  
It seems that Adam Parrish is in a good mood, too, because he’s smiling faintly against Ronan’s shoulder. He doesn’t open his eyes. “Mornin’.”

“It absolutely isn’t.” Ronan kisses his unruly hair and tightens his hold on Adam. The night outside is quiet and dark and the breeze is a little cold, but the layers of mismatched blankets and two male bodies make the futon feel almost uncomfortably warm, and despite the sweat collecting where they’re touching, neither of them are inclined to move. “It’s not even midnight yet.”

Adam opens one eye to squint at his clock, the closes it again and shrugs a little further under the blankets. “You’re a lousy pillow.”

“So move.”

“Couldn’t if I wanted to. I still can’t feel my knees.”

“Fucking weak, Parrish.”

Adam snorts and rubs his forehead against Ronan’s collarbone. “Tell me about it. I deserve a medal for even lasting that long.” 

Ronan feels so unbelievably, stupidly happy that he realizes he's never felt this good about anything in his entire life. It would be so nice to capture this feeling in a lasting way, to go back to and revisit on a whim whenever he pleases, that he could share with Adam

\---

On the twenty-first day, the BMW’s tires are slashed and the stolen hoodie is left under one of the windshield wipers. It’s been burnt badly and is too damaged to wear, but recognizable.

Adam, for some reason, is more upset about the sweatshirt than the tires. Ronan feels like he remembers Adam asking about it and is pretty sure he’d said it had gotten lost somewhere, so it’s sudden and singed reappearance is proof of a lie he hadn’t realized he’d been told. In a way, Ronan doesn’t blame him, but he also doesn’t completely understand why it’s so upsetting to Adam, either. It wasn’t his eight hundred dollar hoodie. It wasn’t his vintage, heirloom sports car. 

Those are the entirely wrong things to remind Adam of. 

They fight for a week.

\--

They don't make it an hour into the thirtieth day.

Ronan drinks for the first time in almost two months afterward.


	19. The One That Breaks Them Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The picture Ronan gave him makes him profoundly uncomfortable, but in a way that’s less hateful than he usually feels towards his own face.
> 
> Adam has never once made a proper self-portrait. It’s too hard to stare at his own reflection long enough to capture the strange lines of his face, too discomfiting to look at a photograph and not struggle with accepting the image as himself. Seeing himself, fifteen years younger, is strange and itchy and he only vaguely sees himself in the boy on the paper.
> 
> He finds himself staring at the picture, for the third time this week, while he tries to decide if he can put off going grocery shopping again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Over two months and probably four hundred attempts to make this chapter happen have culminated into this. It feels good to be back in action!

He didn’t know why he went there. He’d never been here before, and wandering into the West Virginian woods at night during the last cold snap of the year was a terribly stupid idea, but he couldn’t stop himself from abandoning his bicycle against one of the trees and wading into the wild unknown. 

The moon was full and it wasn’t so hard to see as it might’ve been on a night less clear. The sound of his footsteps and his breathing and the rustle of his clothes was loud against the still night and the early spring lack of insect and bird noise. It was peaceful. It was terrifying. He could’ve disappeared or died and no one would ever have come looking for him, no one would ever have found him. 

In a sick way, it was a comforting thought to be left alone for the rest of forever, even if that place would someday disappear in favor of more road or a shopping center or condominiums or, more likely, another trailer park where he would be reincarnated. 

Dr. Poldma’s eyes are dark, dark, dark and they see entirely too much of what Adam is not quite ready to put words to, but she senses his tenuous grip on the timeline of his life and tries to pull him back to the present.

“Did you stay there?” she asks. 

Her words perplex him briefly, until he feels himself snap out of the memory and back into the present. “I don’t remember. I remember waking up at home the next day, in my room. I think I got in through my window, my parents had no clue I was gone all night.”

He’d been gone and gone eighteen hours. 

It was, apparently, not the first time he fell that far out of his own awareness and auto-piloted through the rest of the night and most of the following day. It was, however, and remains to be, the longest episode he’s ever had. He tries to remember being sixteen and losing time like that, feeling it hemmorage and not being able to stem the flow until it resolved itself, by some miracle, and took some of the mess with it. 

Global transient amnesia, the Gansey family doctor called it when it happened while he was staying with the in DC. Dissociative fugue is what Dr. Poldma calls it, and she says it’s happened to her, too. It’s been a long time since he had such an episode, but it’s always a concern that his body is going to wander off without his mind again, for longer.

Dr. Poldma is still looking at him, and he realizes that she’s at a loss for words. Usually, he assumes this is where she would ask if anyone noticed or had comments on where he’d been for those eighteen hours, but by now she knows that no one had. Adam’s parents hadn’t noticed they’d locked him out for the third time that month, his teachers and classmates hadn’t noticed that he was stilted and robotic, his kind-of girlfriend was so tired of him flaking on her that she broke up with him instead of asking where he’d gone.

Without knowing why, he tells her, “Ronan said he loves me.”

“Did he now?” Dr. Poldma asks. If she’s surprised or pleased, it’s impossible to tell. “How does that make you feel?”

His impulse is to say ‘like screaming’ or ‘like peeling my skin off like an orange rind’, but he controls it. “I don’t like it.”

“What a terrible burden it must be.” She says it very earnestly, and he knows she isn’t judging him for not feeling positively about Ronan’s almost-confession.

It really is. It feels like a yoke, but he’s so far managed to not be strangled by it and has resisted trying to injure himself by trying to escape it, too. He scratches his throat. “It hasn’t come up again. I think he’s embarrassed by it, but it’s just--I don’t want him to.”

“To be embarrassed?”

“To love me.” It feels shameful to admit it. 

“Have you spoken about this?” She absently starts to braid the ends of her hair together over her shoulder. “It seems rather important that you do.”

“I just want things to be simple, for once.”

“For someone who claims to want things done simply, you do an amazing job of always taking the hardest path.”

It makes him smile. “Someone once told me I’m so used to things being painful I can’t trust the way that won’t hurt me somehow.”

“Agony is a good motivator,” she agrees. “As is spite, I find. You should, you know. Talk to him about this.” 

Adam knows he should, but the idea of bringing it up makes his stomach turn inside-out. “I know.”

\---

Ronan is hot and hard and there is something so, so satisfying about the way he yields to Adam’s whims. Enthusiastic and open. Unperformed. His bed at Monmouth doesn’t creak and tip anyone off as to what’s happening behind his closed door, but Adam wouldn’t be surprised if they’re being eavesdropped on.

Adam accidentally bites Ronan’s tongue when Ronan’s hands settle on his ass and squeeze. Ronan grunts in pain and Adam sits up, supporting his weight on his hands. Ronan’s mouth is red and a little bruised; fierce, sudden pride sits in Adam’s core like embers. He wonders if his mouth looks the same.

“Did I say you could move your hands?” he asks. Ronan does not remove his hands and looks quite pleased with himself. 

“You’re not the boss of me, Parrish,” he counters.

Adam reaches back and removes one of Ronan’s hands himself and pins it above his head by the wrist. “I could be if you’d cooperate.” Ronan’s expression goes playfully challenging as Adam moves his other hand above his head and holds them down. Ronan’s arms jerk, not enough to get out of Adam’s grasp, as Adam bends to bite his lip. “I’ll tie you down if you’re not gonna make it easy for me, Lynch, I swear to god.”

Ronan groans against Adam’s mouth. 

“What?” Adam asks him. “You want me to? You’d like that?” 

“God, maybe.”

It’s amazing how quickly they go from hot to teasing to hot again, break-neck speeding back on track to do what they snuck off to do in the first place. Adam abandons holding Ronan’s hands down to hook his arm under Ronan’s knee, hiking it up onto his hip to bring them closer together. He can feel the throb of Ronan’s pulse in his thigh, the tender and vulnerable back of his ticklish knees. 

Between sloppy, toothsome kisses, Adam says, “I’ll do it if you want.” 

Between breaths Ronan asks, “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

“You like that?”

“Yeah.” Adam bites Ronan’s lip again. “I really like that.”

Ronan responds with a sound that is so completely un-Ronanlike that Adam tries to pull back to make sure he’s okay. Ronan is obviously okay. Coming so hard he sobs, so hard his eyes tear up. 

Adam feels pretty okay, too.

\---

The boy in the photograph is six years old, thin and dirty. 

Adam catches himself staring at the boy’s wrists and thinking how easily broken they would eventually be, at the smudge of dirt on the boy’s cheek and recalling the bruises that would eventually discolor the same place. Being slapped across the mouth so hard those thin lips would split. Wearing sweatshirts on his birthday to hide the handprints on his arm, wearing the hood up to hide the black eyes. Sitting out during gym class because of a cracked rib that made it hard to breathe. Ducking into a shower stall to change away from the other boys and being made fun of for it. Flinching in the hallway at every loud sound, every shout, every time he was jostled in the tide of children he was supposed to relate to and couldn’t understand.

The picture Ronan gave him makes him profoundly uncomfortable, but in a way that’s less hateful than he usually feels towards his own face.

Adam has never once made a proper self-portrait. It’s too hard to stare at his own reflection long enough to capture the strange lines of his face, too discomfiting to look at a photograph and not struggle with accepting the image as himself. Seeing himself, fifteen years younger, is strange and itchy and he only vaguely sees himself in the boy on the paper.

He finds himself staring at the picture, for the third time this week, while he tries to decide if he can put off going grocery shopping again. 

The day it was taken, Brandy had found a nest of wild rabbits and was showing them to him when her father got out his camera and caught them marveling over how small and frail and still the little creatures were in her hands. At the time he probably thought they were miraculous. Later he remembers thinking about them and how pitiful they really were, how unfortunate to have been born prey and destined to die in the jaws of another, crueler animal or splattered across pavement by a car or shot for callous sport.

Their mother probably abandoned them and left them to die after that day. She probably did it out of fear and selfishness; Adam’s hadn’t abandoned him, but she did neglect him out of indifference. Mothers, after all, cannot be trusted to care for their young after they’ve been manhandled. Mothers, Adam thinks, are overrated.

Twenty-two years ago, Tracy Goins took a pregnancy test and found out she’d made a child with Robert Parrish, and misplaced morality made them marry and keep the thing they would eventually name Adam. Lack of interest made her drop the pretense of vaguely caring about him by the time he was seven. 

Mothers don’t step in between their husbands and their sons to take the blow instead. Mothers don’t put on bandaids or ice packs without using them to teach why no one outside the house can get involved. Mothers don’t send their sons into grocery stores with empty debit cards and wait in the car to avoid the embarrassment themselves. Mothers don’t lock their sons out of the house for the night and act surprised to find them sleeping in the bed of the truck the next morning.

Adam doesn’t take the picture down even though it’s hard to look at, and he hates it a little bit, but he’d hate himself more if he threw it away or burned it. Ronan wanted him to have it, and he supposes it’s a good thing to have a picture of himself, of his childhood. Perhaps when he’s thirty or forty or ninety-five he’ll be glad to have it, but for now he stares at it a few times a week and re-lives the exact moment his father smacked him across the face for the first time, because the picture was taken the day before and he has to pretend that it wasn’t, otherwise Ronan would feel shitty about printing it for him. Adam wonders if Ronan’s feelings for him would be why he’d feel shitty, or if it’s more that it was a presumptuous thing to even do that would make him feel shitty if he knew the truth about the picture.

His cellphone rings on his desk, shrill and unfamiliar because it’s not one of the ringtones he’d assigned to his friends. The same West Virginia number has been calling him periodically for the last several days, but he doesn’t recognize it. Whoever it is has yet to leave a voicemail, and Adam has only learned it’s a cellphone number when he reverse looked it up online. He looks over at it and waits for it to stop. 

The stupid, hopeful part of him wants it to be his mother. 

The rational, bitter part of him, which is most of him, knows it isn’t. She wouldn’t know how to get his cell number even if she’d wanted to call him, and she wouldn’t have the interest in speaking to him anyway. They haven’t spoken since he moved out of the trailer, and she’d made it clear she didn’t care what happened to him after he left that day.

When he does decide that he can’t put off going shopping any longer, he picks up his phone. He stares at the notification for seconds or minutes or hours. 

The strange number left a message.

It’s probably no one, just a wrong number or a telemarketer trying to get him to take out some kind of loan or buy insurance he doesn’t need, but the West Virginia area code sets him on edge. It’s too familiar. It’s too strange a thing to happen so many years after he moved north. 

He taps the screen and it dials his voicemail, palm suddenly sweaty and his heart spasming under his ribs as the soothing female voice tells him he has a new message. He hangs up before he can hear who called.

\---

Ronan leans his forehead against Adam’s hip bone, but the sensation is muted. Pleasantly muted, and somehow heightened into a shivery, weak-kneed sensitivity. They’re both panting a little. Adam is sticky. Ronan’s continued proximity to his crotch is distracting, but neither of them make any effort to move. The shape of Ronan’s skull under his hand feels strangely intimate and Adam’s fingers move over the bristle of his hair unconsciously.

“Sorry about your,” Ronan doesn’t finish the thought. His voice is rough and breathless. “I didn’t--”

Adam shakes his head, and when he remembers that Ronan isn’t looking at him he says, “It’s fine. I didn’t expect you to. You know.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” 

Ronan looks up at him, cheeks flushed and eyes bright and dark, expression open in a way Adam has never seen, that he never expected Ronan to look like. Adam slides his hand from the back of Ronan’s head to his face. Ronan’s eyes drift close and he presses a kiss to Adam’s palm, lashes dark and thick and stark against the whiteness of his skin and the pale bruise of sleeplessness under his eyes. His brows furrow slightly and he leans against Adam again.

“What’s wrong?” Adam asks him.

Ronan shakes his head, shoulders shaking. “Nothing. It’s nothing.” He sounds like he’s trying very hard not to laugh. “My jeans are too fucking tight.”

Adam’s laugh catches them both off guard, like it always does. “Don’t suffer on my account. Come here.”

Ronan’s still trying not to laugh when he gets up. “You, of all people, don’t get to laugh at this.” He fails to sound as annoyed as he’s aiming for, and it makes Adam laugh again as he pulls up his jeans. Ronan goes under the denim pinches his ass in retaliation.

“Asshole,” Adam says. “Bed?”

A lot of communicating happens while they move from the corner they’d wedged themselves into to the futon. Ronan glances at Adam’s mouth. Adam takes in the vulnerable skin where Ronan’s shirt has ridden up, the bulge in his jeans. Ronan sits on the edge of his bed and Adam bites his lip, just a little. Ronan raises his eyebrow, affecting more confidence than Adam can see in his eyes, and Adam kneels on the foot of the bed. Ronan is reaching for him as he leans in, his weight braced on his hands on either side of Ronan’s hips.

“Yeah?” Adam asks.

“Yeah,” Ronan answers. 

Adam accepts this by pushing Ronan onto his back and settling between his thighs. Ronan goes down easily, open and soft and trusting, exposing the most vulnerable parts of himself to Adam to do with as he pleases.

In another world, in a different life, Ronan might’ve been more than just his first guy. He could’ve been Adam’s first. Not that he has much in the way of competition in this one, but there are two girls, including Blue, who came first; he’s not even sure if Ronan’s ever actually been with anyone and is either or if he’s working from experience. It doesn’t really matter, Adam supposes, because they’re here now, together, and Adam is learning. 

Adam’s hands are tugging at Ronan’s zipper. It takes Ronan a few minutes to remember how to breathe and he has to pull away. Adam doesn’t mind and focuses his attention on Ronan’s jugular, teeth and tongue and pulse.

“I wanna blow you,” he says, vowels loose. 

Ronan hauls Adam into another kiss. “God,” he murmurs, “Yes, Jesus Christ.”

Adam bites his lip. “Call me Adam.”

Ronan bites him back. “Asshole.”

Adam laughs and pulls back to sit on his heels. “No promises, it’ll probably be lousy.” His hands are on Ronan’s thighs, the muscles under his palms tense. Ronan looks up at him and tries to make it clear that he could give less than a single fuck how good it is so long as Adam’s the one blowing him and Adam rolls his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that, I’m serious. I don’t think sucking a dick isn’t anything like eating someone out.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Ronan manages. 

“Well.” Adam pulls Ronan’s jeans down around his thighs. “Let’s hope skill in one translates to the other.” 

Ronan’s face goes so pink it’s almost cute.

\---

“You can borrow it, really,” Tad tells him. “I don’t mind. I like walking anyway.”

“I can’t drive stick,” Adam lies, “But thanks.” He looks at Tad’s Audi and tries to picture himself driving it. He can’t. It’s not the right color, not the right kind of European luxury for him. Swift as summer rain, he hates himself for thinking he has any right to be picky about such a thing. “I’d look weird behind the wheel of an Audi anyway.”

“Are you kidding?” Tad asks. He takes off his Coach sunglasses and holds them up in front of Adam’s face. “Get a pair of fancy shades on you and you’ll look like an ad for the company.”

He rubs his cheek against his shoulder, a little embarrassed. “Still trying to get that date, huh?”

Tad looks down and fiddles with his sunglasses. Adam leans against the window beside him with his hands behind his back. Across the street, a store Adam’s never been in starts to set up their sidewalk display of tie-dye skirts and dresses and hair wraps and cheap sunglasses and handmade jewelry. The store’s name is ridiculous, as are the names of most of the stores around here. What, he wonders, would make any kind of berry groovy? How does it even make sense?

“It would be nice,” Tad says. His voice is quiet compared to the traffic, and he’s signing as he speaks. It’s second nature to him, he doesn’t even seem to realize he’s doing it. The nuance of it is largely lost on Adam, but he appreciates it all the same to fill in what he can’t hear. “I won’t lie, like, that would be awesome, but like, I know you’re kinda, you know, with that other guy.” 

Adam hadn’t known Tad knew about what happened with Ronan. Tad flails a little, the way Blue sometimes does when she’s embarrassed. “Oh shit, was I not supposed to know that? I’m sorry, I take it back, I didn’t say anything. I don’t know anything, really.”

“No, no, it’s fine.” Adam’s not bothered that Tad knows, except that he feels bad for not bringing it up sooner. “We–I just, we haven’t really done anything about it yet. I didn’t think anyone knew.”

Tad shrugs. “Intuition, I guess. I mean, I didn’t really think I’d ever get that date.”

“How come?” 

“Well, like, I don’t…” Tad trails off for a minute, at an apparent loss for words for the first time since Adam’s gotten to know him. In an unconscious way, he taps at his chest. “Considering how I am, I figured it was kind of a lot to expect from anyone just yet, to be okay with it, I mean.”

“That’s fine,” Adam says. Tad goggles at him. “That doesn’t matter to me.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No.” He always knew it didn’t make a difference, but saying it aloud makes it feel more legitimate. “And it shouldn’t, if someone really likes you.” Adam shifts to cross his arms over his chest. “Maybe that’s just me, I don’t know.”

Tad snorts. “It’s just you. Really. If I had a dime for every time some girl hit on me because she thought I was gay, I’d be rich.”

Adam can’t help it, but he smiles. “You are gay. And rich already.”

“Yeah, well.” Tad smiles. “My point stands. I haven’t met a guy who didn’t care about...that. Not since I started really trying to pass.”

Adam bumps his shoulder against Tad’s. “Sorry.”

Tad bumps back. “Don’t be.”

Adam wants to tell him that he’s going to make someone else happy someday, but instead he says, “I bet we could get a table now.”

“Thank god, I’m fucking starving,” Tad replies. 

\---

“My fucking car.” Ronan scrapes his hands over his head once, twice, a third time as he paces the narrow space of Adam’s kitchen, caged and furious. “That son of a bitch. My fucking car.”

The damage done to the BMW is appalling, yes, but more easily undone and actually worth the price tag. That the cost to repair the car and the money wasted on the sweatshirt are nothing to Ronan makes Adam feel worse. That Kavinsky, in all his awfulness, would show such callous disregard for someone else’s precious things makes Adam ill.

“You told me you threw that sweatshirt away.”

“What?”

“Your sweatshirt,” Adam grits out. He’s so angry he’s shaking. “You told me it got ruined and you threw it out. You lied.” He doesn’t know if he’s angrier that Kavinsky was telling the truth or that Ronan lied about it. He throws the bloodstained, charred remnants of the sweatshirt onto his desk chair like it’s still on fire. He doesn’t feel any better.

“Fuck that,” Ronan snaps. “I’ll get a new one if it means that much to you, Jesus Christ.”

Adam laughs, just once, without any humor. “I don’t give a shit about it, Ronan. You should. It cost as much as a new set of tires.”

Ronan stops pacing and stares at him, strangely calm and therefore more intimidating. “So?”

“‘So’? That’s eight hundred dollars. On a hoodie you didn’t even care about in the first place.” Adam feels ill even needing to remind Ronan of the expense.

“Not all of us need to count our fucking pennies, Parrish.” 

The sudden switch from simply angry to furious is so sudden and consuming Adam can’t remember how to dismantle the rage burning in his chest, the sweep through him like a forest fire. If Ronan realizes what he’s done, Adam doesn’t notice. 

The anger doesn’t go away after they get into a shouting match that has Adam’s neighbors knocking on his door. It doesn’t go away when Ronan storms off. It doesn’t go away when the girls that live in the apartment to his right go timid when they pass in the hallways now, which they’ve never done before.

It doesn’t go away for days.

\---

Ignoring the notification for the voicemail is much harder than he thought it would be. As someone whose phone is generally never used except for the occasional text and recording lectures, the constant reminder that he has a call he isn’t responding to makes him anxious. Incredibly anxious. 

That the number tries again, while he and Ronan are in the middle of a fight, does not help. 

It leaves another voicemail.

Adam realizes he’s going to have to answer to the messages at some point if he’s not going to lose his mind first. 

\---

“He told me you left it at his place. After you spent the night there. You lied. You told me and Gansey you were at your studio all night, and you went to Kavinsky’s when you promised that you wouldn’t hang out with him anymore after what happened.”

“You two don’t fucking control me, okay, if I want to keep hanging out with him, I can, and you can’t stop me.”

“You _swore_ \--”

“I can’t just cut him loose--”

“He has other friends, he doesn’t need you.”

“You don’t know that--”

“Did you sleep with him?” When Ronan doesn’t answer right away, Adam repeats himself, demanding. “Did you sleep with him?”

Ronan’s continued silence is damning, and when he finally speaks, he doesn’t lie. “Not that time.”

Adam makes a sound like the wind was knocked out of him, a jagged kind of exhale. 

Ronan’s hands are shaking. “You knew all along, didn’t you? You’ve been sitting on this for weeks and it’s a perfect out, because you’re scared or some shit--” Ronan is so furious he goes silent, flushed and shaking with visible effort to not lash out in Adam’s small room, at any of his few, cheap things. After a long moment that feels so tense it could snap them both in two, he grits out, like it pains him, “I love you. You know I do.”

“Why did you even bring it up?” Adam feels frayed, unravelled, stretched thin and nearly breaking. “What does you loving me have to do with you fucking Kavinsky and lying about it?”

“Because it’s not like that with him. It’s never been like that. He only happened because I didn’t think--” Ronan inhales deeply, exhaling slowly. “It’s always been you.”

Dr. Poldma told Adam he needed to talk to Ronan about this, but he doesn’t think this is what she’d had in mind. Suffocating as rage, sludgy and dark, some emotion he can’t name snuffs out almost everything else and the place where he thinks his heart is is scraped raw. The stupid, useless organ thrashes like an animal in a trap, too wounded to know it’s beyond saving, too desperate to stop fighting. The cavity of his chest feels endless. 

“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” he asks, voice strained. Part of him is rapidly disappearing, retreating someplace less exposed, leaving the part of him still having this fight behind. “It just makes me feel worse. Like I’m defective.” Ronan’s expression softens, and Adam’s mind tells him it’s pity. It enrages him all over again. “Don’t fucking look at me like that.”

“I'm not asking you for anything." Ronan scrubs his hand over his face, over the accumulating stubble on his jaw. “I don't get you, Adam. What do you want from me?”

Adam wants so many things he can’t even identify them all anymore. A million simple, necessary things. A clutch of intrinsic things. One single monumental thing. A dozen frivolous things. Two very specific things. Most of them he’ll never get.

“I don’t know,” Adam admits. 

“That’s fine,” Ronan tells him. His reasonable, sedate tone feels weighted on Adam’s ear. 

Adam shakes his head. “No, it isn’t.” He swallows thickly. “I don’t want you to love me. I didn’t ask for it. I don’t want it. What am I supposed to do with it?”

Ronan’s expression is raw. “Nothing. You don’t have to do anything with it.”

They both know why, really, Adam is struggling with this and neither of them says it aloud. It’s probably one of the uglier parts of Adam that is usually much better hidden than this. He’s cobbled together an approximation of what passes for love in a platonic sense, but when it comes to relationships it always manages to rear it’s ugly head and become the obvious Frankenstein’s monster of all his insecurities and compensating that it is. It’s a clever trick, manipulative and subtle. Blue threw it in his face in the end. Ronan will, too.

Adam is poison. And he knows exactly who to blame. He says, “I don’t want your love.”

Like a child Ronan asks, “Why?”

Adam wishes he had a better answer. “It’s a fucking burden and I don’t want it.”

“It’s not something I can take back to a fucking store, Adam,” Ronan spits. “It’s not charity or pity or whatever the fuck you think it is. I don’t even want you to love me back if you’re not ready--”

“I will never be ready, don’t you get it?”

“If you weren’t so determined to be unhappy you could be.”

Adam burns. “You think I want this? That I do this to myself?”

Ronan is burning, too. “You’d rather be miserable and have someone you can fuck and take your shit out on so you can feel better about yourself than be vulnerable with them.”

“You weren’t complaining about that a week ago.”

“I am now.”

They glare at each other across the room for what feels like hours. Behind Ronan, the clock on the stove reads 12:17. They’ve been fighting for hours, for a week straight. There’s no end to it in sight, and at the same time, they both seem to come to the same conclusion, on the thirtieth day of this thing they tried to make happen. 

“I'm sorry," Adam says. “I don't think anyone has ever really loved me.”

“I do.” He doesn’t look at Adam as he says it. 

Adam’s insides do something unpleasant. “I don’t believe that.”

“I know. But I don’t care.” He takes his keys out of his pocket. “Because it's true.”

Adam looks away from him, and by the time he looks back Ronan is gone. Adam didn't hear him leave. He left his key to Adam’s apartment on the counter. The clock tells him ten minutes have passed, but it feels longer and shorter and like he’ll be reliving the moment he turned away from Ronan for the rest of time.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I lied about it feeling good to be back. This one hurt. A lot. It won't be two months before the next update, I promise.


	20. The One With the Worst Week Ever

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He groans and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes until he sees starbursts. 
> 
> For the second or third or eighth time today, he gets up to find something to eat, and realizes again all he has is a box of instant oatmeal, a questionable orange, a slightly more questionable carton of beef lo mein, a half-empty bag of stale tortilla chips, and, inexplicably, a square package of frozen spinach he doesn’t remember buying. It’s possible the spinach has been here as long as he has, or longer. A years old package of frozen anything is not a thing Adam wants to consume, but he leaves it in the freezer rather than putting it in his trash bin where it belongs. If it’s been here longer than he’s lived in this apartment, it’s the longest relationship he’s ever had with anything.
> 
> He watches his failing coffee maker struggle to produce another pot. 
> 
> He tries and fails to take a nap twice on Monday.
> 
> He watches the coffee pot again, still not finished with that pot.

In the aftermath, Adam does what he always does in times of distress: he throws himself into school and work and engages in a considerable amount of self-indulgent misery and a few bouts of tears, late at night, in the privacy of his shower.

He learned a long time ago that sometimes a body and brain decide they need to cry without the consent of the person inhabiting them, and that this is a thing he is prone to from time to time. On Saturday during his shift at the garage he happened to look down and there were damp spots on his coveralls, and he rushed into the bathroom to collect himself before anyone noticed his face had spontaneously started leaking over a cracked fuel line in an old Nissan. 

Even more sickeningly, he felt his mind slip sideways several years back, and he remembered doing that exact thing at the shop he’d worked in in high school. Scrubbing the tears away with the sleeves of the uniform he didn’t fill out, realizing that the way he vanished when his father hit him was starting to spill into other moments, wondering if there would be anything for him to eat when he got home, hoping tonight would be a good night and he’d be let in and ignored--

Oh, there he goes again, dripping on his medieval and renaissance history notes. He grunts irritably and roughly wipes his face with the heel of his hand, blots his notebook with the hem of his shirt, and goes back to reading about the rise of Christianity in eastern Europe. Thank god this shirt is black and the stain of ink won’t show.

He’s fine, really. No, really, he is. Really.

That’s a lie.

He wants to be fine, but the first few days after are the worst ones he’s lived in recent memory. In a life full of terrible and emotionally scarring days, that’s quite an accomplishment, and that one of the few people who has been responsible for some of Adam’s best days is to blame makes it even worse.

 

Adam blots his notes again. Now it’s just getting old.

It’s pathetic and sad; he’s not the one whose heart got broken, just the one who did the breaking. He has no right being so upset about all this, and he knows Ronan is definitely upset. He doesn’t need to be talking to Ronan to know that. Gansey says he’s worried Ronan’s fallen off the wagon again, which isn’t strictly true because Ronan’s never been fully on it to begin with, but he’d been totally sober for almost the entire month that he and Adam were together. Dating? Boyfriends? Friends with benefits? 

They never even put a label on it. 

 

God, what a disaster it turned out to be.

They never had sex, either, so it’s not like they were just fooling around or fucking or something straightforward like that. There were new things involved and a new kind of body to learn. There were _feelings_ involved. Feelings are always a problem, but _feelings_ are another issue entirely.

Ronan hadn’t actually said he loved Adam until that last fight, but the implication, the unspoken fact of it, had been there all along and Adam was as discomfited by that as he was by hearing it aloud. He didn’t want to be bothered by it. He desperately, achingly wants it, with a shameful kind of hunger he didn’t know he possessed, and yet here he is, starving and lonely and nursing a wound almost as long as his memory. Adam has a long memory. He is also good at compartmentalizing, which means that there are parts of that long memory locked up and shoved into dark, dusty corners never to be opened again, where they will fester and rot until, someday, he dies. 

How emotionally crippled is he, really, if the idea of being loved, after craving it for his entire life, is so repulsive to him?

He thought he’d been in love with Blue, but he was probably wrong or confused. He wanted to kiss her and hold her and fuck her, but it wasn’t really about her. Not really. She was pretty and she smelled nice and she let him kiss her and hold her and fuck her, right up until she let Noah do those things because she’d realized she’d never actually loved Adam at all. She only thought she did, because he was the first guy that she’d ever allowed to take up her time. Adam didn’t even begrudge Blue and Noah for what they did, because he realized that he’d checked out of whatever little attachment he had for Blue when he noticed how Ronan looked at him. 

Adam realized that he’d been using her like a bandage on a wound that he didn’t have a name for all along, and he let her go in the end without a fight. It wasn’t fair and it wasn’t right and she deserved so much better than anything he could’ve ever offered her. And she’s happy, even if he still feels a little wounded that she couldn’t be happy with him, even though he doesn’t understand why Noah and why Gansey and why both of them at the same time.

He has a headache and the now constant notification that he has voicemails he’s still ignoring is barely even a blip on his radar. He wishes his apartment had a bath; taking one is supposed to be relaxing and comforting, if not a massive waste of water and time and once, just once, he wishes he didn’t instantly feel guilty for wanting to do something so indulgent. It would be really nice to do that.

He groans and presses the heels of his hands against his eyes until he sees starbursts. 

For the second or third or eighth time today, he gets up to find something to eat, and realizes again all he has is a box of instant oatmeal, a questionable orange, a slightly more questionable carton of beef lo mein, a half-empty bag of stale tortilla chips, and, inexplicably, a square package of frozen spinach he doesn’t remember buying. It’s possible the spinach has been here as long as he has, or longer. A years old package of frozen anything is not a thing Adam wants to consume, but he leaves it in the freezer rather than putting it in his trash bin where it belongs. If it’s been here longer than he’s lived in this apartment, it’s the longest relationship he’s ever had with anything.

He watches his failing coffee maker struggle to produce another pot. 

He tries and fails to take a nap twice on Monday.

He watches the coffee pot again, still not finished with that pot.

Another ten pages of Greenmantle’s notes transcribed and revised, now that the final has been announced, and at least as many for all his other classes. 

On Tuesday, he tries and fails once to take a nap. When he’s not at work or in the studio, he listlessly searches through Netflix for something to watch and settles on a cooking competition he has no real interest in. It requires the contestants need to come up with something edible made from ingredients he’s mostly never heard of. There’s elimination every round and a rotating panel of condescending judges and a host who dresses like Henry Cheng that doesn’t appear to actually do anything but announce the time and lift a lid to reveal which chef is being sent home. By the sixth episode he’s mumbling critique at his laptop screen and eating the stale tortilla chips with a long awaited and burnt tasting cup of coffee. 

The irony that he, a redneck who actually likes canned chili and box macaroni and cheese, is offended that someone didn’t poach a quail egg properly is not lost on him.

“You deserve to go home,” he grouses around a mouthful of chips, as an arrogant prick of a chef with stupid facial hair tries to pass off his lackluster egg as a deliberate choice. The condescending judges and fashionable host are as unimpressed as Adam is. He sits through another four episodes, all of which feature children who seem to know more about food and knives than Adam ever will and have ambitions that make him feel lazy and unmotivated and unbearably old. 

On Wednesday he runs out of food shows and attempts to watch one on tattooing, but it infuriates him because it makes him think about Ronan’s tattoo. He switches to a body painting one instead and gets choked up when he finishes the first season on Friday, because he’s strangely proud of the girl who won, and makes a mental note to tell Blue about this show, because it’s something she’d be interested in--it even seems like something she’d be good at. 

After work on Wednesday, Adam very nearly misses waking up in time to go to his afternoon art and physics lecture. He manages to get through another three pages of his reading for Greenmantle’s class and revises five pages of notes before his concentration is shot and he starts to mope over them again. 

Sleep eludes him completely on Thursday and Friday, so he settles for laying face-down on the futon and alternating between groaning in frustration, screaming into it, and not-crying, and then repeating the process face-up and with his pillow over his face. Then he schedules his final critique for his sculpture and when it’ll be installed on campus before graduation.

He gets up and goes to take a shower, and he remains there until the near-constant water pressure and temperature fluctuations become unbearable and the glass and mirror are fogged up. He never takes a long enough or hot enough shower for that to happen, and it is a small consolation for not being able to take a self-pitying bath. 

Monmouth has a bath.

He is not going to go to Monmouth to sulk about Ronan in the fucking bathtub. 

The tub in Monmouth is probably questionably clean, anyway; he knows that any cleaning that gets done there is half-assed and inconsistent at best, or entirely neglected at worst. He’d probably end up with a staph infection on top of whatever deep psychological wounds he already has, and the fewer hospital bills he needs to pay the better. 

He should probably wash his towel now that he thinks about it. 

The bathroom mirror has rust around the edges, collecting around the screws holding its corners to the wall and a slightly funhouse effect that makes it one of Adam’s least favorite reflective surfaces he encounters in a given day. Sometimes, at just the right angle, the image in it is normal if slightly elongated and washed out by the single yellow-tinged fixture in the ceiling. Other times, it’s unsettling and gruesome, warped into a parody of human facial structure and magnifying all his worst attributes. 

It’s doing the latter today, no matter how he tries to stand in front of it, reflecting the distorted and empty way he feels, and he decides to forgo shaving entirely. Too much trouble, and no one will really appreciate the effort now anyway.

The routine feels very familiar in a way. When he first moved here it was the April before he graduated high school and he’d spent the first four months in a mostly deserted dorm room, working and apartment hunting and taking summer classes and waiting for his high school diploma to arrive in the mail, because his tiny, underfunded high school managed to make an exception and let him graduate a month and a half early. 

He spent those first four months alone, much like he is now, reeling from a different trauma altogether in a room that smelled like fresh paint and unclean air conditioner filters, hoping that his stay here would be temporary. And when he realized he wasn’t cut out for dorm life, he moved to a temporary apartment, where he still is almost four years later. It’s late April now. 

There’s a knock at the door. He leans out of the bathroom to stare at the whiteboard hanging crookedly on the door--he very emphatically wrote UGH on it at some point in the last few days and has gone over it again in at least three different color markers--and holds his breath, praying whoever it is goes away so he can continue to mope in peace. 

He doesn’t really want to put on clothes and talk to anyone, either.

The door rattles a little as the person on the other side of it knocks again, harder. UGH vibrates impatiently at him. Adam continues to do nothing, and whoever is outside continues to knock. They do not go away.

Adam hits his head against the wall once, twice, and exhales heavily, annoyed. “For fuck’s sake.” He is absolutely not in the mood for this and his clean pajamas take the brunt of it it as he pulls them on. He does nothing to disguise his irritation at his wallowing being disturbed when he opens the door.

“Jesus,” Gansey says, as Noah says, quietly and with a lot of feeling, “Wow.”

“I’m fine,” Adam replies. “Go away.”

“Oh, yeah, no, your misery beard is the picture of fineness.” Blue shoulders past him into the apartment and her purse nearly knocks the wind out of him. Noah invites himself in with more grace, and Gansey hesitates for a moment before Adam gestures, pointlessly, for him to come in. 

This apartment is entirely too small for this many people in it at once. Gansey remains in the kitchen while Blue flops down on the futon and Noah takes up residence at Adam’s desk. Adam shuts the bathroom door, trapping the lingering steam and warmth inside, just to have something to lean against. He scratches his chin and realizes that he does, in fact, have a misery beard and should’ve shaved after all.

“You--how are you?” Gansey says after an awkward minute of the three of them staring at Adam. 

“Do not say ‘fine’ again,” Blue warns. She points at Adam like she’s daring him to say it. “You are not fine. You’ve been shut up in here for a week and ignoring everyone.”

“Fifty bucks says he ran out of things to eat on Thursday,” Noah says.

“It was Wednesday, actually,” Adam tells them, but it falls a little flat since Blue’s sitting next to the empty chip bag still on the futon. 

She flicks it distastefully. “The sell-by date on this is from a month ago,” she notes. 

Gansey looks like a worried parent as he peers into Adam’s fridge and cabinets. “Adam, come on. There’s literally nothing here. Good lord, are those Dinosaur Eggs? The oatmeal with candies in it?”

Adam glares at him and closes the cabinet for him. 

“That’s slightly more functional than day drinking,” Noah mumbles. It is a subtle reference to Ronan’s current state, which Adam had only guessed at and hadn’t been able to consider too closely without having a nervous breakdown. It sours his already sour mood even further. Noah looks around the room, at the entirety of Adam’s life and the four hundred square feet it’s wedged into. His attention snags on one of the window sills. “Is that an ash tray?”

Blue’s disappointment is palpable. “Oh, Adam.” 

Weeks ago he told Kavinsky that he didn’t smoke, and then, once the initial shock over what happened with Ronan finally sunk in and the anxiety over the as-yet-unheard voicemail from the strange phone number had peaked immediately after, he hunted down the cigarette Kavinsky had bestowed upon him and sucked it down so fast it made his chest burn and his head spin. That was Friday. Now, almost a week later, he’s most of the way through a second pack from the gas station down the block.

The habit is a relic of his youth, masochistic in a way that didn’t leave a mark anyplace someone could see, and therefore more deeply satisfying because of it. It’s not like his lungs aren’t screwed anyway from breathing in car fumes and god knows what other ones float around an art school and this poorly ventilated apartment building. It is, apparently, something he does under extreme duress. 

“I’m not sure this is better than day drinking,” Noah says. 

Adam sneers. “Hypocrite.” Noah goes through a carton a week.

“Yeah, well, that’s neither here nor there.” He gets up to examine the pack and frowns. “These are terrible. If you’re gonna fuck up your lungs at least do it right, Adam, Jesus.”

“You’ve been so good,” Blue says. “What was it, two years?”

“Not quite.” He crosses his arms. And, because he’s a masochist, Adam asks Gansey, “How’s Ronan?”

Gansey’s expression gets pinched, apprehension on brow and tightness around his eyes. He glances at Blue, whose eyebrows are nearing her hairline, then at Noah, who is more pointedly investigating Adam’s smoking paraphernalia than he was a moment ago.

“That bad?” Adam asks. Perversely, it makes him happy to know Ronan’s as miserable as he is. 

Gansey purses his lips. “He’s fallen off the wagon completely.”

Noah lights up a cigarette of his own with Adam’s lighter. “He’s also functional. Kinda. In the loosest sense.”

Blue leans over to take one of Adam’s pillows and hugs it to her chest. “I think he misses you.”

Adam feels himself bristle. He hopes Ronan misses him. Ronan should miss him. This whole clusterfuck of a relationship was Ronan’s fault, so he’d better miss Adam. A small part of Adam’s brain tells him Ronan wanted too much and has no right to miss him, and another small part argues that Ronan hadn’t asked for anything but permission to stay in Adam’s orbit, and that he has every right to be devastated. 

“Yeah, well, that’s his problem,” Adam says, unconvincingly brusque. “He’s the one that made things weird.” Noah meets Adam’s eye for a fraction of a second and looks away. His smoke smells better, cleaner, almost certainly lacking in carcinogens. 

“Oh, Adam,” Blue says again. She stretches her much shorter arm towards his much longer one until he lifts his hand into her reach for her to hold. 

“I actually had a favor to ask,” Noah says after a few quiet moments pass. “I need a ride into Kingston on Monday, around three. Would you mind?”

Adam shrugs. It’s not as if he had any plans between his last class and work. Though he wonders why Noah would want him to make the drive and not Gansey or Blue.

“We also wanted to know what your plans were for Mother’s Day,” Gansey says. “Helen wants to come up and do brunch at West Point and invited you and everyone from Fox Way. We’ve practically filled the place up already.”

Blue is watching Adam very closely. “No pressure.”

Adam feels pressured anyway. He hates Mother’s Day, and Father’s Day, and every other holiday. Especially, he realizes, Easter. “I don’t think I can. Work and all, I can’t give them enough notice this close to it.”

Like he did at Easter, Gansey looks disappointed. “Are you sure? My parents have been asking after you.”

“And Helen,” Noah says. “She invited you by name.”

In a testament to his misery, this fact does nothing to improve Adam’s mood. The thought of Gansey’s haughty, sexy older sister kidnapping him is normally a surefire way to improve Adam’s outlook on nearly anything; if he wasn’t so damn prideful, he’d try to convince her to follow through and make it happen so he could finally live luxuriously and easily in some stainless steel penthouse in a dustless skyscraper. Normally he’d let it ride as a joke, but right now being kept for Helen’s amusement sounds like a vacation he doesn’t deserve.

“I don’t think,” Blue says, “You should shoot it down so fast. It might do you good to get out of here and, like, socialize a little. Get dressed up and go let Helen flirt with you, it’ll be fun.”

“I’ll make sure she threatens to kidnap you again,” Gansey offers. He even offers an encouraging smile. “Maybe she’ll finally make good on it.”

“I can’t promise anything,” he offers, “but I can try.” 

It makes Gansey smile, a tentative and hopeful thing that makes Adam’s heart ache. It might be the best thing that’s happened to him since Ronan left.


	21. The One With Kavinsky's Feelings

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “I’m gonna go.”
> 
> Kavinsky stands and drops his spent cigarette onto the floor. It starts to burn the cheat, stained carpet fibers. The smell is smoky and a little chemical before he grinds his shoe against the butt. “You’ll never make it across campus like this.”
> 
> “I’ll take my chances,” Ronan replies. Navigating around the coffee table is perilous and Kavinsky follows him around from the other side. Even nearly too drunk to stand, Ronan still has a lifetime of boxing, the better half of a foot and more than a hundred pounds on Kavinsky does on his best day. He doesn’t feel threatened, not really, but he’s also not processing at full power and Kavinsky is always dangerous.

“Did it occur to you,” Kavinsky says. “That I’m not the right person to hang out with when you’re getting shitfaced anymore?” 

Ronan grunts irritably at him. 

Kavinsky’s lip curls. “You fucking degenerate.”

There’s no argument there. 

Ronan lifts his head from the arm of Kavinsky’s smoke-scented couch to take a sip of beer. He brought it with him, because even already addled he remembered there wouldn’t be any in Kavinsky’s townhouse. A lot of the last week is a blur. Not because it was particularly busy or exciting, but because a lot of it is doused in alcohol and Ronan’s tolerance isn’t what it used to be since he started cutting back last year.

“Couldn’t stay at Monmouth,” Ronan says. His mouth feels like it’s not forming the words quite right like it’s stuffed with cotton or novocaine numb. “Not like this.”

“Aw, that’s right. Dickie’s got that stick up his ass.” He blows a cloud of smoke towards the squeaking ceiling fan. “Hey, remember when he used to be fun? Me, neither.”

Someone in Monmouth has to be uptight, Ronan figures. It’s not like he or Noah have their shit together without Gansey’s influence keeping them both from falling apart at the seams. Gansey’s rituals and habits and OCD tendencies establish order and routine in two people that wouldn’t have them otherwise. But, Ronan promised Gansey he wouldn’t drink like this at home, and so, he came here.

Kavinsky keeps looking at the beer. It’s still really disconcerting to see the slight difference between his irises and his pupils. Ronan preferred him with those unreadable black shark eyes. 

“Go ahead,” Ronan says. “I don’t care.”

Kavinsky shudders, the way someone does when faced with something they desperately want. He starts to lean forward for the six-pack, then stops and retreats into his chair again, curling his legs up onto the seat like his knobby knees will shield him. 

Once, a long time ago, just after the coke but before it was a real problem for him, Kavinsky told Ronan he wanted to be a chemist. He’d said it one summer afternoon when they tried to follow an internet tutorial to make homemade napalm to test in a back pasture of the Barns when no one else was home. In a way, he did become a chemist. Just not the way he’d thought he would when they were thirteen.

Kavinsky sucks down the rest of his cigarette quickly and replaces it immediately with another one. Ronan shrugs and takes another sip before laying back down. 

Kavinsky’s no fun anymore, either. 

“So, like, what’s got you so fucked up?” Smoke pours out of his mouth as he speaks. 

Ronan grunts again.

“I’m just saying, man, you laid off for a while there. Something happened. You’ve got some shitty, unhealthy coping mechanisms.”

“You’re one to talk.”

“No shit.” He waves his cigarette around and it ashes on his designer joggers. He rubs his nose, eyes the beer again, and fidgets in his seat. He almost looks good, or at least better than he has in weeks. Less dead-eyed, more animated. Still teetering on the uncomfortable edge between ‘very thin’ and ‘needs to be fed through a tube’. 

Once, a not-so-long time ago, just after juvie but before the first trip to rehab, Kavinsky told Ronan he wanted to disappear. He’d said it one winter morning when they’d spent the day in Ronan’s boarding school dorm room playing violent video games and not talking about the new scars on Ronan’s arms. Ronan keeps coming back to the comment, which had seemed more deliberate than offhand. Just a confession that he understood the scars enough to not ask about them.

“So,” Kavinsky prompts him. “Spill, Lynch, or I’m gonna start spitballing.”

Not wanting to hear whatever Kavinsky could offer as reasons for Ronan’s bender, Ronan says, “Me and Adam fought.” He doesn’t look up to see Kavinsky’s expression, but he can’t imagine it’s anything but pleased. Selfish bastard has always wanted Ronan all to himself, even if he had to force that to happen. Again. “I think we broke up.”

“Well, shit.” Ronan hears him drag heavily on his cigarette. “What happened? I can only assume he’s the one at fault here, since you’re the one drowning your sorrows.”

“He got mad about what you did. Then madder when he found out we’ve slept together. Jealous, I guess, I dunno.”

Ronan looks up to find Kavinsky studiously examining the little singed hole in his joggers. 

“He’s fucked up. You don’t even know the half of it, he’s a fucking mess.” He flicks ashes towards Ronan’s arm. “Don’t give me that kicked puppy face. You knew what you were getting into with him. I warned you, man, don’t kid yourself.”

Ronan jerks his arm and sits up after the ashes land on his elbow. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Kavinsky sighs heavily, the way one does when they have to repeat themselves one too many times. “I told you he got jealous. I wasn’t just making that shit up. He got mad at me a couple weeks back for telling him we’d hung out, and you know what he said? He said I could _keep you_.” He makes air quotes around ‘keep’ and Ronan’s heart burns in his chest. “That he didn’t want to _share you_ with me. His words, man. Bet he left that part out when you were fighting, right? You could ask Swan’s roommate, what’s his name, Todd. He was right there the whole time, he heard it right out of Parrish’s mouth.”

Swan’s roommate. Todd? No, Tad; Swan’s roommate’s name is Tad. There’s no way there’s more than one Tad running around campus between Swan’s townhouse and Noah’s office. It has to be Intern Tad. The freshman. Adam’s freshman. No, sophomore, he has to be a sophomore, because the freshman can’t live in the townhouses. 

_He said I could keep you_. Did Adam really say that? Ronan’s heart implodes and takes his stomach with it. _He didn’t want to share you with me_. Kavinsky’s a pathological liar but he’s never outright lied to Ronan before--omitted details and told half-truths, constantly, but never lied. He has no reason to start now, let alone about Adam when Ronan’s here, with Kavinsky, because Adam rejected Ronan’s feelings and threw them in his face. As far as Kavinsky is concerned, he’s won whatever cold war he’d been having with Adam by virtue of Ronan being here rather than begging Adam to reconcile. 

But Adam came with for Easter even though they’d fought a few days before. He let Ronan kiss him and kissed him back. He drove the BMW halfway back from the Barns. 

Sufficiently pleased with Ronan’s stunned silence, Kavinsky leans forward and takes the beer bottle away from him before he can drop it and chugs the remainder. He makes a face, but it’s not a bad one. 

“Goddamn me.” He cackles at himself and tosses the bottle across the room, where it shatters against the bathroom door. It’s the strongest flicker of himself Ronan has seen in months. “I’m gonna fail my next check-in, but fuck it, I needed that.” He takes a long, thoughtful drag of his cigarette. “Don’t tell me you’re surprised, Lynch, I thought you were smarter than that.”

Ronan says nothing and, horrifyingly, his eyes burn. He’s not drunk enough to cry, because he’s always passed out before getting to that point, but the hot stinging feeling in his eyes is coming on faster than oblivion. He blinks and rubs his eyes until he sees stars. 

Kavinsky is strangely quiet. Then, with a little wonder, he says, “Holy shit, are you crying?”

“Fuck off.” He isn’t, not yet, but he's still perilously close to it.

“Oh my god, you are.” Kavinsky laughs, disbelieving. “Because of Parrish? Are you for real right now? What, do you love him or something?”

Ronan grits his teeth until his temples hurt. “Fuck off, K.”

“Lynch. Lynch, come on. No you don’t, not him.” When Ronan’s expression doesn’t change, Kavinsky’s amusement disappears. “Are you shitting me? You fag, you totally do. And Parrish, of all people? Jesus fucking Christ.”

At first, Ronan didn’t believe it, either. He’d brushed off so much of what he felt for Adam in so many ways. He wasn’t gay, it was just a weird fluke and nothing more. Simple attraction to an attractive person and nothing more. Just an inconvenient crush on his friend and nothing more. An unrequited and one-sided more-than-crush and nothing more. Mutual attraction and an unfortunate attachment to someone else and nothing more. Just friends of the most intimate kind and nothing more. 

Something more.

And now nothing more.

Kavinsky is spitting with indignation over it. Ronan doesn’t even hear him. 

Once, a long time ago, just after starting high school but before everything else, Kavinsky cornered Ronan and kissed him. Ronan had been too shocked to react to it, and Kavinsky had taken that as an invitation to do it again a few days later. And a few days after that, and a few days after that. Ronan never stopped being shocked by it but he’d never been happy about it, either, and on Sundays he’d go to confession and beg for forgiveness from the priest on the other side of the partition who had a direct line to God.

Things have always been messy and complicated with Kavinsky, because Kavinsky had latched on to Ronan when he’d had no one else in the world he trusted, and Ronan had let him. Neither of them understood and neither of them were old enough to put together the pieces of what happened into a picture of something with a name. Kavinsky had taken something irreplaceable that wasn’t given to him and Ronan let him because what they did was what people who loved each other did. He thought he had to love Kavinsky to make it okay, so he convinced himself he did. 

Then Kavinsky killed his father and was shipped off to juvie, and the path that led him to what he’d done to Ronan made more sense as it came to light. The words for that were clinical and familiar but not easily understood, and at the end of the day no one had blamed Joseph Kavinsky for blowing his father’s head off with a .45.

“Are you mad because you love me?” Ronan asks, interrupting Kavinsky’s tirade.

“Don’t be gay,” Kavinsky snaps, livid.

In the end, twisted as it is, Ronan does still care about Kavinsky, but it’s never been quite the way Kavinsky has wanted it. Kavinsky probably doesn’t know what he wants any better than Adam does.

“You’re pissed because it’s not you,” Ronan says. It becomes truer as he puts words to it. “You’re jealous because you want me all to yourself.”

Kavinsky’s nostrils flare and his glare is unflinching. “Don’t project your fucking feelings onto me. I’m not like you.”

Ronan doesn’t think he’s projecting and he’s not sure what Kavinsky is like, but he remembers the boy who kissed him ten years ago and sees him in the man sitting beside him now. And that man is not vindicated, not angry on his friend’s behalf, but jealous. 

“You got what you wanted. Why are you so pissed off?”

“Don’t tell me what I want,” Kavinsky says. “You’re not my dad.”

Ronan pushes himself upright for the first time in hours, groaning at the effort and the tilt of the room. It puts an extra two feet between him and Kavinsky and that feels like a good thing, because when Kavinsky talks about his dad like that, sticking around isn’t going to end without someone calling the cops. “I’m gonna go.”

Kavinsky stands and drops his spent cigarette onto the floor. It starts to burn the cheap, stained carpet fibers and the smell is smoky, a little chemical, before he grinds his shoe against the butt. “You’ll never make it across campus like this.”

“I’ll take my chances,” Ronan replies. Navigating around the coffee table is perilous and Kavinsky follows him around from the other side. Even nearly too drunk to stand, Ronan still has a lifetime of boxing, the better half of a foot and more than a hundred pounds on Kavinsky does on his best day. He doesn’t feel threatened, not really, but he’s also not processing at full power and Kavinsky is always dangerous.

“You’ve gotta stop walking out on me like this,” Kavinsky says, “It’s getting old. It’s like you’re treating me like a hooker you can use and leave whenever you want. It’s starting to fuck with my head.”

Ronan places his hand on one of the walls to balance himself as he moves towards the door. “Why would it fuck you up? I thought you weren’t _like that_.”

There’s a long, long suffocating pause, a tension that’s so near to snapping it could break bone. A hiss. Ronan hazards a glance over his shoulder and sees Kavinsky chugging another one of the beers he’d abandoned next to the couch like he can drown the unspoken truth Ronan’s accidentally dredged up. “Kavinsky.” 

Kavinsky buried the ugly truth and the confusion and the pain under the coke, the pills, the alcohol, the experiment with heroin that nearly killed Prokopenko and got him hauled off to rehab again. He's backpedaling the only way he knows how to when he skirts too close to anything real.

“K.”

He hid behind the drugs like he could pretend the things he did, the things he wanted, were pure hedonism rather than anything deeper, some twisted kind of conditioned response, a reaction to what happened to him when he was a kid. It's easier to wrap his mind around when he's drunk or high because it hurts him less.

“Joey.”

“ _Don’t_.” It comes out like a gunshot. His knuckles are white around the neck of the bottle like he’s trying to choke it. “Don’t you fucking dare, Ronan.” It’s almost too much, Kavinsky just throwing Ronan’s name out there like that, but Ronan crossed that line first. “You don’t get to call me that, not when you’re walking out on me again, not when you were just crying about some other guy.” His hand shakes a little his grip is so tight. “Get the fuck out of my house. Don’t come back this time. Just leave me alone.”

Just for a second, he thinks this is the last time he’ll ever see Kavinsky. It’s a feeling he’s had before that’s never managed to take, but something about this time feels different. More permanent. Ronan doesn’t want it to be the last time, but it’s better than some of the other ways he’d imagined it would go. No blood, no gore, no flames, no hospital, no drugs, no mangled car. Just Kavinsky and his shark eyes and his shame and his fury, on the verge of relapsing again, telling Ronan to leave him alone. He’s never done that before. 

Ronan leaves him alone. Again. And this time he knows he won't be coming back.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm still trying and failing to get my ass in gear and crank out the second half of the story in time to meet my self-imposed deadline for the final chapter, but we'll see!


	22. The One On Mother's Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’ll have to call back, you know. Find out what needs to be done.”
> 
> “I know.”
> 
> “You don’t want to.”
> 
> “Not really.”
> 
> Gansey’s expression does something pained and a little hesitant. “You don’t care, do you?”
> 
> Adam looks him in the eye. “No, I don’t.”

Gansey is seldom as at ease as he is behind the wheel of the Pig, but today he’s visibly anxious as he drives past suburbs and through farmland cluttered with apple orchards, bed-and-breakfasts, historic museum villages, driving parallel to the Hudson River. It appears and disappears behind trees and hills and houses as they head south towards West Point, and Adam finds himself getting lost in thought as he watches for it out the windshield. 

“You okay?” Gansey asks. “You’re awfully quiet.”

Adam fights the urge to run his hands through his hair. It took an unspeakably long time to tame his cowlick today and he won’t do anything to jeopardize it when seeing Helen is on the line, not when he’s in such dire need of her approval. His tenuous, fickle ego needs the stroke too badly. “You mean compared to usual?”

“Well, obviously.” Gansey fiddles with the temperamental radio until the local alternative station comes through mostly without static. The female DJ chatters excitedly about a contest to win tickets to a concert Adam would love to go to if he was the concert-going type. “You like that band, don’t you?”

“Yeah.”

“Would you want to go?”

“Gansey, _no_.”

Gansey frowns. When he frowns, he does it with his whole body, visibly deflating. “For your birthday. The concert’s the week before.”

Because, Adam thinks, twenty-two is such a monumental birthday to commemorate so extravagantly. He gestures to his left ear. “I don’t think it’s the kind of thing I can really enjoy anymore. To justify the cost.”

“Oh.” Gansey deflates a little more. “Of course, how uncouth of me. I’m sorry.”

“Already forgiven.” It makes Gansey perk up again. A song with a lot of banjos and British accents crackles through the stereo and Gansey bobs his head along to it, silently mouthing along. Adam almost feels bad for interrupting him to ask, “So, who’s coming?”

“My parents and Helen,” Gansey says. He doesn’t seem bothered to be interrupted. “Declan and his girlfriend told Helen they’d be there, though, which was a surprise. Helen seemed happy, she and whatshername were in the same sorority at Yale.”

“Ashley,” Adam supplies. 

Gansey points approvingly at him. “Yeah, that’s it. Ashley. Did you know they’re engaged? Did Declan say anything on Easter?”

Adam ignores the simmer of irritation at the mention of Easter. “No, but we could tell. She had a tan line on her finger. They hadn’t told Aurora yet, something about her not liking Ashley or something.”

“Sad,” Gansey murmurs as he turns onto a street named after the military academy they’re driving to. “She seems perfectly fine and Helen likes her.” His brow creases. “Quite some eyes on her, though. She’s awfully nosy about my thesis and my grad school prospects.”

“She was like that when I met her, too. Very curious about my and Ronan’s work, what we were studying. Professional curiosity, I guess. Her parents own some kind of auction house in New York.”

“ _Oh_ ,” Gansey says. He draws it out the way people do when they realize something obvious. “I thought her name sounded familiar. I’ve dealt with her parents before, for my mom’s plates.”

Adam can feel his eyes glaze over at the mere mention of Senator Gansey’s plate collection. “Those fucking plates,” he says.

“God, I know. What a waste,” Gansey replies. With a little darkness in his voice he adds, “I used to fantasize about using them to help me sleep at night.”

Adam laughs. “How? Eating off them?”

“Yeah, and using them for frisbee. There were usually big dogs involved somehow. My grandfather’s old hunting dogs, think?”

“You could shoot skeet with them, too.” Adam pantomimes using a shotgun and makes a _chk-chk_ sound. “Boom, no more Limoges.” 

“Jesus!” Gansey needs to take a moment to collect himself. “I never even thought of that. You’re a genius.”

They continue along that train of thought, coming up with increasingly elaborate ways to put the plate collection to good use (“What about using one of the big ones like a sled?”, “Put a few of the not-glass ones together and make a cart. Haul the rest around on it.”) as they approach the campus and it’s glorious old stone buildings and manicured lawn. They don’t approach the main part of the academy, but Adam is badly impressed by it all the same, in a way he doesn’t think has to do with the fact that it’s a military academy any more than the fact that it is very old, very distinguished, and very nice to look at. 

Gansey’s phone vibrates against the cup holder he has it wedged into, vibration ugly against the plastic, and he pulls it out to glance at the screen before handing it to Adam, distracting him from appreciating the view.

 _Dick_ , Helen’s text says. There’s a helicopter emoji next to her name. _Will you be here before we all die of old age or what?_

Adam snorts and reads the text out loud. Gansey groans.

“I don’t know how far away we’ll have to park,” he says to himself. Adam raises his eyebrows expectantly as he waits for Gansey to continue his thought. “Oh I don’t know, ten minutes? Longer if we have to turn around and park in town.”

“I’ll ask her to meet us somewhere?” Adam says. “There’s a spot over there.”

Gansey points at him in approval again and Adam texts Helen. 

It is very warm, not quite unseasonably so for early May, but warm enough that Adam feels self conscious about breaking a sweat before they get inside. The polo shirt from Aurora feels like not enough compared to the dress uniforms and fine sundresses and precisely pleated khakis milling about around them. He tugs at it.

“That’s a wonderful color on you,” Gansey says. Ronan would say something along the lines of 'don’t be gay, Gansey' and the thought momentarily cheers Adam before souring within the span of a second or two. 

“Do you see her?” 

Gansey glances around and somehow manages to look dignified as he squints in the sunlight over the tops of cars and around other mingling clusters of people in their summery Sunday best. Adam tugs at his shirt again and prays it didn’t shrink when he washed it. The color didn’t fade and it ironed easily enough, but he can’t tell if it fits the way it did a few weeks ago or if he’s just imagining that it feels smaller. He knows he’s probably just imagining it, but next to Gansey’s pristine white and blue checkered shirt and pink shorts--and they are short, shorter than Adam would ever be caught dead wearing--with their little blue sailboats on them, he feels drab and underdressed. His khakis aren’t even pleated.

“There she is,” Gansey says after a few minutes of wandering around. He raises his hand and waves across the road at Helen, who waves back and crosses her arms as she waits for them. 

Her skirt is very nearly the same powdery blue of the sailboats on Gansey’s shorts and her top is striped with pink pinstripes that match the rest of his shorts. Adam wonders if they’re intentionally matching, or if it’s some kind of coincidental sibling telepathy. 

“I thought for sure you were flaking on us,” she says. Her chunky, mannish watch probably cost more than a year’s worth of rent for Adam’s apartment and then some.

“And leave you to suffer alone? Hardly,” Gansey replies. They hug, very briefly, in a WASPish way that is not at all like how Ronan and Matthew hug, how Noah hugs his sisters, or how Blue hugs her family. “You remember my friend, Adam Parrish?”

“I do,” Helen says. Gansey introduces him the same way every time, despite the fact that Helen and Adam have met enough times to have made lasting impressions on each other. She smiles and gives him a once-over that almost feels less than polite. Contemplative, maybe, or considering. “You clean up well, Mr. Parrish.”

“Thanks, Helen,” he tells her. “And thanks for inviting me.”

She waves her hand. Her nails are the same pale pink they always are, shiny and neat and filed pragmatically short and squared off. “Oh, please, we’re happy to have you here.”

“Shall we?” Gansey asks with a grand, traffic-directing kind of gesture. “I believe there’s a crowded buffet being picked over without us.”

Helen laughs. _Ha ha ha_. “Hopefully there’s some left for all of us, we were waiting for you to get here.” To Gansey she says, “Did either of you see Ashley’s ring yet? It’s gorgeous." She makes a circle with her thumb and index finger to indicate the size. Adam disguises the involuntary choking sound he makes with a cough and Gansey snorts. "You can’t even see where the Titanic hit it. Mine will have to be at least twice the size of hers.”

Gansey steps ahead of Helen to pull a door open for her. “You’d need a little cart to pull your arm around on with all the extra weight.”

Helen laughs again, just a single ha that sounds more like agreement than amusement. She strides, because simply walking is for ordinary people and not Ganseys, across an already crowded dining hall to a long table next to an open door to the balcony that overlooks a spectacular view of the Hudson River. 

The senior Ganseys are also wearing pink and blue, respectively, in more subdued shades than their children. Adam is convinced they coordinated this, in the event of a publicity photo opportunity. Someone also thought to leave a seat close to the window open for Adam, so his deaf ear is to the glass and not to the table. The Ganseys on the whole are quietly thoughtful that way, though they’d never make it obvious, but it makes him feel a little less anxious. 

Gansey’s parents stand to greet them, making a portrait of American money against the bright blue sky. Adam knows from experience that Gansey’s mother expects a handshake at the very least and has an impossibly firmer grip than her husband, and that he should brace himself for Richard Gansey II to clap him on the shoulder like he always does. 

Seeing the four of them together is to see a matching set, all glossy hair and flawless smiles and healthy tans from somewhere European and cultured. Even dressed down, the four Ganseys are unapproachable when congregated in a single place.

Declan and Ashley almost look out of place at the table, but they’re a different kind of polished than the Ganseys; less country club chic and more fashion week couture, wearing their wealth casually and with more tousled poise. They do make a striking couple, though, all monied youth and expensive vacations and a Fifth Avenue apartment and brand new matching Volvos. They don’t stand up to say hello, but coming from them it doesn’t seem rude so much as it’s unnecessary to.

Looking at Declan is a little difficult because he does look so much like Ronan, and Adam is more than a little embarrassed to see him so soon after everything; he might not have come if he’d known Declan would be here before he was already in the Pig this morning. Adam tries to focus on his hair rather than his face. Adam has a feeling Declan’s more than aware of the Ronan situation. 

“That shirt does look good on you,” Ashley tells him as he sits down across from her. “Aurora has good taste.”

“She can’t hear you,” Helen says. Her voice comes from behind Adam and he almost doesn’t hear her. She takes the seat next to him. “I’m going to hang out down here, I see my parents all the time. Mimosas? I want to order another round when the girl comes back.” 

Adam passes and, surprisingly, so does Gansey. The elder Richard gives his son a weighted look that lasts less than two seconds before he orders a pot of mint tea for the table. Helen reaches across the table to take Ashley’s hand to examine her ring. It is, indeed, huge. It’s nearly the size of a nickel and rectangular, set in what looks like shiny copper but is undoubtedly more valuable.

“How many carats is it?” Helen asks.

“Six,” Ashley tells her. Adam didn't even know it was possible to buy a stone that big anymore. How big is the Hope diamond? He used to know, he saw a full-scale print of it once in an Earth science textbook. Ashley wiggles her fingers, the movement breaking his chain of thought, her nails are long and filed into actual points, matte black and dangerous, the opposite of Helen’s practical short, squared-off pink ones. “It weighs a frigging ton.” Declan’s smile is unapologetically smug and has an air of _I told you so_ about it. 

“It’s beautiful,” Gansey says. He catches Adam’s eye and Adam has to suppress a smile at the utter lack of appreciation for it on his face. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” Declan says. Ashley beams and holds her hand to appreciate the ring herself. “Before you ask, we haven’t set a date yet. It’s the first thing everyone’s wanted to know after how big the diamond is.”

Ashley’s hands disappear under the table. Almost shyly she says,“I still think eloping would be really romantic.”

This whole conversation strikes Adam as frivolous and exclusionary and he wishes Blue was here to talk about the horrors of the diamond trade and the archaic, misogynistic traditions of weddings. _Love isn’t even sacred anymore_ , she’d say. It’s a business, an opportunity to get people to waste money on a shiny trinket, a dress that will never get worn again, to spend thousands of dollars on a party that takes months to plan and is over in a single day. And half those marriages end in divorce, anyway.

Adam told Noah, when he’d still been dating Blue, that he’d wanted to marry her. At the time, when Noah had told Adam he thought it was a terrible idea, Adam had been offended. Last week Noah confessed that he wants to propose to Blue despite knowing she’s not thinking about things like that yet, despite knowing how she feels about the institution of marriage. Adam hadn’t expressed anything but mild surprise, which seemed to have been all Noah expected, and they’d quietly agreed to pretend the conversation, like the first one, had never happened. 

People around him are starting to move towards that more grown-up part of their lives--Fletcher and his boyfriend and the baby and the nice condo across town, Declan and Ashley and their six carat diamond promise, Noah’s impending PhD and tenure-track job offers, GRE prepping and grad school writing samples being planned--and here Adam is, still reeling from realizing he doesn’t feel love, listening to the people around him weigh the merits of eloping versus wedding receptions. 

Defective, he’d said to Ronan. It feels truer every day since, every time he starts to prod at old wounds and examine his unreliable sense of attachment. More real as he’s started to come to realize that he’s never loved anyone. How would he even know? How can he ever be sure he’d actually wanted, however briefly, to marry Blue? What does it even feel like? 

The room is suddenly very loud and very crowded and Helen’s perfume is dizzying. There’s a dark shadow of movement in the corner of his vision. He catches Gansey’s eye again and excuses himself as politely as he can while hurrying towards the door that will bring him back out to the parking lot. It takes a lot of conscious effort to shove all that insecurity back into its box, and more to shove that box into the back of his mind. 

He cannot unpack this here, not now. 

The cigarette burns and makes him feel a little more connected to his body and settles his nerves. The abrupt, unexpected buzz of his phone startles him back into reality. 

It’s the unfamiliar West Virginia number again. His thumb hovers, like it always does, as he debates whether or not to answer, until the call is transferred to his voicemail. It leaves a third message for him that he intends to ignore until the number gives up on calling him altogether. 

He’s stalling, he knows, but he taps the notification for the new voicemail and brings his phone to his ear. He pulls it away to type in his password and brings it back up. 

"You have three new voice messages," the automated woman tells him. "You have one saved voice message. To listen to your messages, press one."

He presses one.

"First voice message."

“Hello, this is Judith Meyers. I’m calling from Summersville Memorial Hospital, and I’m trying to reach Adam Parrish in regards to his mother, Tracy Parrish. If Mr. Parrish could call me back at this number, extension 2833, it would be very much appreciated. Thank you, have a good day.”

"Next voice message."

“Hello, this is Judith Meyers. I’m calling from Summersville Memorial Hospital. I’m trying to reach Adam Parrish in regards to an urgent matter involving his mother, Tracy. This is the only number we have for him on file. If he could please call me back at this number, extension 2833, as soon as possible, it would be very much appreciated. It’s urgent. Thank you, have a good day.”

"Next voice message."

“Hello, this is Judith Meyers, calling from Summersville Memorial Hospital again. There are arrangements that need to be made and this is the only number we have on file for Tracy Parrish’s next-of-kin--” 

Adam hangs up, cutting Judith Meyers off mid-sentence. When he returns to the main entrance of the hotel, he finds Gansey waiting for him on the sidewalk.

“I thought maybe you got lost finding your way back,” he says, putting his phone back in his pocket. Something about Adam’s expression makes him frown. “What’s wrong?”

“I think--I think my mom is dying.”

“What?”

Adam lifts his phone, still in his hand, in a helpless gesture. “I’ve been getting calls from a number I don’t know, voicemails I’ve been ignoring. It just called and left another message, and I listened to them.” He looks at the blackened reflection of the sky on the screen of his phone. Strangely, he doesn’t feel anything as he relays the facts to Gansey. No grief, no anger, no desire to go and see her--Tracy Parrish, his mother--before she dies. He doesn’t even feel guilty for not caring. “This woman from the hospital just called again and left a message, she said something about making arrangements.”

“I’m so sorry,” Gansey says. It might be a platitude, but Adam knows Gansey is sincere. “But what about your father?”

Adam hadn’t even thought of him. He shakes his phone, but not with anger. “She didn’t say anything about him. Just that mine is the only contact info for my mom’s next-of-kin.”

“Can I?” Gansey asks. Adam dials his voicemail and hands the phone to him. Gansey frowns and starts to rub his bottom lip with his thumb as he listens to Judith Meyer’s voicemails. Adam leans against a light post and lights another cigarette while he waits. Did his parents get a divorce in the last few years? Did his father die? Was he never his wife's emergency contact? 

When Gansey lowers the phone to disconnect the call, he doesn’t hand it back right away. “You’ll have to call back, you know. Find out what needs to be done.”

“I know.”

“You don’t want to.”

“Not really.”

Gansey’s expression does something pained and a little hesitant. “You don’t care, do you?”

Adam looks him in the eye. “No, I don’t.”

He expects admonishment, to be told that that’s cold and horrible and that he should care that his mother is dying and needs him to get her affairs in order, but it never comes. Gansey sighs heavily and scrubs his free hand over his face, then hands Adam his phone back. 

“Well, then.”

“Yeah,” Adam replies. He stubs out his cigarette on the bottom of his shoe. “If we don’t get back in there we’re never going to eat anything.”

Gansey sounds very tired. “I am starving.”

As they go back inside and Adam tries to decide how many other people need to know about this, Gansey touches his shoulder, just for a few seconds, with the iron grip and quiet strength he gets from his mother. 

It's more reassuring than anything either of Adam's parents did for him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Funny how a chapter that ends in death could lack so much for sadness--I don't blame Adam one bit, myself. Also, Gansey is hard to write? And I love Helen and Ashley and had to cut literal _pages_ of this chapter to keep it reasonable and not unnecessarily focused upon how awesome they are. Whoops?
> 
> Next update: Adam and Ronan finally speak again since their big fight/breakup. I know you've all been waiting for it!


	23. The One When Adam and Ronan Finally Talk

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Gansey told me,” Ronan says. “About your parents.”
> 
> So Gansey had told everyone while Adam had been in class yesterday and today. Adam had assumed as much, considering the circumstances. This is where Ronan’s supposed to say he’s sorry, or some other empty bit of lip service about death and grieving, but he doesn’t. He knows, better than most, that those kinds of platitudes don’t mean anything. Adam appreciates that about him. 
> 
> “You okay?” Ronan asks. 
> 
> Adam shrugs and blinks slowly, drowsily, and hopes Ronan understands he has nothing to say.
> 
> “Declan was,” Ronan goes on. There was a time when it would’ve come out bitter or judgmental, angered because his brother didn’t mourn as violently as Ronan had. “When Dad died. He just...handled it. Handled everything.”
> 
> “He’s capable,” Adam replies.
> 
> Ronan shrugs and looks at the floor as he scuffs the toe of his expensive brand-name sneakers against the tile. “So are you.”

When he signed the scissor lift out of maintenance earlier, Adam had to sign a form saying he’d not abuse the equipment, that he understood how expensive they are to replace should it be damaged while in his care, that he knew he was supposed to be using it for work. His work with it entailed securing parts of his sculpture to the joiners across the atrium of the campus museum. What he’s doing now, though, instead of returning it to the night crew down at the maintenance office, is laying down, smoking and nursing a thermos of lukewarm coffee from Nino’s, watching the stormy sky from two stories off the ground and listening to an androgynous sounding singer go on about clean executions.

This is a reprieve from everything that’s happened over the last several weeks.

It feels good, being this close to the sky. The black, glittering void spills across the glass paneled ceiling, taking up his entire field of vision. At some point, Adam succeeded in emptying his mind and sinking into his work, and now he’s nearly meditating, scrying into the black mirror of the sky and coming storm beyond the glass.

This is as close to peace as Adam has felt in weeks. Maybe months. The breeze from the window pane he opened is pleasantly cool, damp with rain and fragrant with ozone, mown grass, and dust. His skin is cold and his chest is burning from smoke, but he can taste the drizzling rain on his tongue when he exhales, clean and wet and green with early summer. 

Through the shifting clouds, he catches glimpses of stars and dim flashes of distant lightning, the nearly full moon. Everything he can see is bathed in dark and dim shades of blue and black Two stories below him, the first floor of the atrium is dimly lit with security lights from the main lobby down the hall, dotted with spotlights on some of the displays that stay on all night. 

He is the only person here and has been for hours. 

He is not thinking about his sculpture, the change-major request form he filled out this afternoon, the essay he needs to finish revising, his shift at the garage in a few hours, calculus, physics, make-up classes, Ronan, or Judith Meyers. He is not thinking about what she had to say when he called her back yesterday, where he has to go once classes are over in ten days, what he will need to confront when he gets there. 

A door opens somewhere in the building and he stubs out his cigarette. It would be impossible to smell it from the floor below, but he doesn’t want to get caught breaking a law on a piece of borrowed equipment long after he was supposed to have left the museum for the night. Footsteps echo throughout the adjacent lobby and gallery arms, near the auditorium, and eventually come down the hall towards him. It’s probably campus security, maybe maintenance coming looking for the lift. Adam debates drawing his legs up onto the platform and pretending to not be here, but he sits up and peers over the side of the platform; it would be pointless to hide when the lift is clearly in use. 

Ronan is looking up at him, small and insignificant from this height. His hair has grown out more than usual and he has a beard, an actual beard, but otherwise he looks the same as ever. Good, even. It’s probably the light and the distance.

They both know Adam would never hear Ronan from this far away, so Adam shows him one finger in the universal sign for hold on as he brings his legs up over the edge of the platform, goes up on his knees to close the window, and reaches for the control mechanism to bring the lift down to the first floor. It takes a very long time and it’s incredibly loud after the quiet hours Adam has just spent here. Ronan watches for a minute or two and, seemingly satisfied that Adam is coming down to his level, wanders off to look at other pieces already on display while he waits. Adam wishes he had the same luxury because his hand starts to cramp after the first minute of holding down the temperamental button. He carefully shifts back to sitting at the atrium’s mezzanine level.

Ronan’s looped back around to where he’d started by the time the lift and Adam are back on earth. He doesn’t look like he expects Adam to get off the platform and looks up at him. It’s disorienting, being taller than him. Adam dangles his legs over the side of the lift again and leans his arms and chin on the safety railing. They look at each other and say nothing. Ronan shoves his hands into his pockets and Adam closes his eyes. 

“Gansey told me,” Ronan says. “About your parents.”

So Gansey had told everyone while Adam had been in class yesterday and today. Adam had assumed as much, considering the circumstances. This is where Ronan’s supposed to say he’s sorry, or some other empty bit of lip service about death and grieving, but he doesn’t. He knows, better than most, that those kinds of platitudes don’t mean anything. Adam appreciates that about him. 

“You okay?” Ronan asks. 

Adam shrugs and blinks slowly, drowsily, and hopes Ronan understands he has nothing to say.

“Declan was,” Ronan goes on. There was a time when it would’ve come out bitter or judgmental, angered because his brother didn’t mourn as violently as Ronan had. “When Dad died. He just...handled it. Handled everything.”

“He’s capable,” Adam replies.

Ronan shrugs and looks at the floor as he scuffs the toe of his expensive brand-name sneakers against the tile. “So are you.”

The corner of Adam’s mouth twitches into a small, tired smile. Of all the things in the world to want to be, "capable" is high on Adam’s list. In the dark, his eyelashes look twice as thick and dark and almost fake. Adam watches him avoid his gaze for a moment and closes his eyes again, abruptly exhausted. “So. Are we talking again?“

“I...” Ronan says again after a few quiet minutes pass, filled by the music still playing on Adam’s phone. Adam opens his eyes. “I’m--I’m sorry I left. I shouldn’t have, not like that.”

Adam is perplexed by the statement for a few seconds, wondering if he’d dozed off and not noticed Ronan wandering off again, when he realizes Ronan means the night of their fight. Ronan seldom, hardly ever, apologizes first--his self-awareness doesn’t extend that far once it butts up against his deliberate and stubborn nature. Adam isn’t even sure he’s ever apologized first, or made the first approach in the aftermath of an argument or a fight. 

What Adam means to say is that it’s fine, even though it wasn’t. What he means to say is that he understands, even though he doesn’t. What he does say, in an appallingly fragile way, “You left your key.”

Ronan looks at the floor again. “Yeah.”

“How come?” Adam feels childish even asking it.

“I--I was angry. I wanted to hurt you, the only way I could think of that wouldn’t make me…” He trails off and shakes his head. 

Adam sits up straighter. His pulse trips in a way it hasn’t in years. His veins tremble with a little half-remembered fear. “Ronan, if you really want to hurt me you should just hit me like my dad did. I know what to do with that, it would’ve made me feel less shitty about everything.”

It’s appalling to even say out loud, torn free from some hidden recess before Adam could stop it from coming out. Ronan looks disquieted and pale, like he’s just watched someone throw up. It burns and stings Adam’s throat just the same. He blinks and looks away until the shameful thing is hidden again, the crack spackled over, but it remains exposed between them, hideous and festering, hanging from cobwebs. 

Ronan’s swallows thickly. His voice is hoarse. “That’s fucked up.”

“I know.” Adam scrubs his hands over his face. “I know it is. I’m fucked up for even saying it. I’m…” he trails off, at a loss, unable to finish the thought, with a helpless gesture. He doesn’t look at Ronan and drops his hands to his lap. The singer has one chance to move someone and they both listen to him try.

Adam doesn’t realize his eyes have closed again until Ronan taps his knee, very lightly, to get his attention. “You know I’d never. Right?”

It’s not even a real question. Adam knows it with unshakable certainty, because it’s a higher truth than anything else in his life: Ronan would never raise a hand to Adam, even if his life depended on it. He just needs to hear Adam say it out loud, and maybe Adam needs to hear it from his own mouth, too, so he says, “You’d never.”

Ronan nods once, satisfied. “I thought it’s what you would've wanted me to do. The key. I thought you would’ve wanted space, so it made sense to give it back, since we’d." He can't bring himself to say _broke up_. "You know.”

“ _We_ didn’t decide anything,” Adam says quietly. There’s a hum under the place where his heart beats. “ _You_ decided we wouldn’t stay together when you left the way you did.”

“Why would you want to stay together?” Ronan asks. “Isn’t that a burden?”

The jab hits Adam harder than he thought it would, because his feelings haven’t changed, but it resonates a little too deeply for his comfort. Barbs meeting thin skin and tender flesh that can’t protect itself. Not five minutes ago Adam felt at peace. Now he just feels cold and brittle.

“I never said being with you was a burden. It’s your feelings that are the problem.” He watches the barb catch on one of the tender parts of Ronan he tries to keep hidden and doesn’t feel badly for enjoying it. “But that doesn’t mean it’s for you to decide like that. I didn’t ask you to leave, I didn’t tell you to leave your key, I didn’t tell you to get drunk and crash with Kavinsky. That was all you.”

“You started the whole thing when you flipped your shit over him,” Ronan fires back. “You had no right. You don’t know. You weren’t there. It never had anything to do with you and it was over for months. I wasn’t the one sneaking around with someone else.”

“I told you it wasn’t like that.”

“Why should I believe you? You don’t believe me.”

“It’s not even remotely the same. That’s like saying I can’t take Greenmantle’s classes because I’d blow him if he asked me to. It’s bullshit and you know it.” Ronan opens his mouth to retort, but says nothing. He closes it and tries again, and Adam snaps. “What?”

Ronan lifts his hands like he’s pushing against something, a "hold up" kind of gesture. “I’m sorry. Did you just say you’d blow Greenmantle?” 

Adam blinks, anger dampened by confusion. “Yeah?”

“Are you fucking serious?”

Adam feels like he’s waiting for the punchline of a bad joke, or for the jump scare in an innocuous seeming video. When Ronan says nothing and waits for him to respond, Adam nods slowly. 

Ronan drops his hands. Flabbergasted is a strange look for him. “Greenmantle? Seriously? Why?”

“Why what?” Adam asks, feeling defensive and unfairly judged. “He’s hot. You wouldn’t?”

“ _No_.” The disgust on Ronan’s face is so comically sincere Adam laughs at him. Despite himself, Ronan laughs, too. “He looks like a serial killer. And he’s so old.”

“He’s, like, maybe forty-five. That’s not old.”

“He looks like Ted Bundy.”

Adam laughs, and it's the loudest thing in the museum since nightfall. “He does not!”

“He totally, completely does,” Ronan insists. He points at his eyes. “He’s got those crazy eyes, man. If he asked you to blow him you’d end up a sex zombie in his basement with a hole in your head.”

“That was John Wayne Gacy, the clown guy, not Bundy. Bundy was the one with the Volkswagen.”

“Well, you would know, you fucking freak.” Ronan grins, the partial light making an eerie grimace of what Adam knows is one of his better-natured, teasing smiles. It is almost completely normal, Ronan taking the piss out of Adam over nothing that matters. The peaceful feeling is gone, but so is the cold and the thrum of anger, and he doesn't even mind when Ronan calls him a sociopath.

“You asshole." He punches Ronan's shoulder. 

Ronan must be thinking about how _them_ this feels, because his eyes search Adam’s face and he puts his hands in his pockets. Adam sighs as focuses on the space between Ronan’s eyebrows, leans on the safety bar again, and starts swinging one of his legs.

He thinks, _I missed this._ He’s not sure Ronan understands at first, but something seems to shift in his expression. Adam raises his eyebrows slightly. _Is that okay?_

Ronan nods and steps closer, almost close enough for Adam to touch without trying very hard. It’s okay. 

It’s something, even though Ronan’s eyes are trained on the floor now. Adam watches the shadow cast by his eyelashes for a moment, then tugs lightly on Ronan’s shirt and doesn’t let it go. _I missed you._

The _I missed you, too_ is clear as Ronan closes the distance between them until Adam has to shift his legs further apart to accommodate him.  
Separated by the safety bar and mutually thrown off by the reversal in their heights makes this feel safe rather than fraught, reasonable rather than foolish. This close, Ronan smells like rain and whiskey, and it feels cleansing to breathe him in again. Adam knows he smells like smoke and sweat and coffee and cheap deodorant, but that never seems to bother Ronan. He doesn’t know what he ever did to deserve so much of Ronan’s affection, doesn’t think he deserves any of it at all. 

“You look like a criminal with that beard,” Adam says, instead of saying any of the other things he should, instead of saying _sorry_ or _I love you._

Ronan bumps his forehead against Adam’s, not hard, but in a way that’s more retaliation than affectionate instead of saying _sorry_ or _it’s okay if you don’t_. “I like yours too, Parrish.”

It feels, strangely or maybe not-so-strangely, exactly the same to kiss Ronan now as it did the very first time. Dry lips on dry lips, almost chaste, tentative and light enough to hardly feel like anything at all, slow enough to make Adam’s chest cavity ache. Now, though, there’s a different hesitation and a different relief, some familiarity with how to fit together, the safety bar between their chests. 

The woman singing on Adam’s phone says things have to start to end. Adam pulls back, not enough to stop sharing Ronan’s breath, but enough to breathe.

“I don’t want to go back there,” Adam whispers.

“I’ll go with you,” Ronan whispers back, knowing exactly what Adam meant without being told. What must it be like, to know someone who barely knows himself so well? 

It pains him, but Adam shakes his head. “I think I'll need to be alone.”

Ronan understands. “I’ll wait.”

This close, Ronan has just one eye, huge and blue, but it doesn’t scare or rattle Adam to look into it. “I don’t think my feelings are going to change, Ronan.”

“That’s fine.” Ronan swallows audibly. “I mean, it will be.”

“Will it?”

“I’ll wait,” Ronan repeats. “It’ll be okay.”

They both are and aren't talking about Adam going back to Henrietta. Adam wants to believe him, more than he's ever wanted to believe anything. "Will it?"

Ronan’s single eye blinks. “Won't it?”

“I think I need to be alone. For now, anyway.”

“You make it sound so simple.”

“When, since the day we met, have things ever been simple?”

“Never.”

“Exactly. But, you’re just...okay? With waiting?" He can feel the thin veneer of his impending return to Henrietta fall away before the words leave his mouth. "What if I never make up my mind?”

“Then you never make up your mind.” Adam is suddenly cold as Ronan finally leans away from him, but he stays between Adam’s legs and looks up at him. “Some things really are simple, Parrish. I did drop the l-bomb on you pretty fast. No wonder you freaked.”

Adam bites back a wry smile. “Yeah, you did."

"And who says I won’t change my mind first?” The thought makes Adam’s hand clench involuntarily against the safety bar. “But I’ll still be here. Always. Okay?”

“You think we’ll stay friends? Either way?”

Ronan's bottomless sincerity is nearly too much to bear. “I was hoping so.”

Adam flops backwards and presses the heels of his palms against his eyes. "Thank god."

The lift squeaks a little, buckling slightly as Ronan climbs onto it to lay back beside Adam. He fiddles with Adam’s phone, turning the volume up a little and half humming, half singing along to it for the first verse, about temporary dreams and sleepwalking through windows. Somehow, any song that mentions dreams or sleep is a song Adam knows Ronan will like. He’s dreamy that way, but Adam would never tell him that, because he’d never hear the end of it. 

“View good up there?” Ronan asks. 

There’s still a lot to talk about, a lot of things to figure out, but it doesn’t have to be now. Adam has to return the lift and get ready to go to work, Ronan needs to get back to Monmouth before Gansey starts to worry where he’s gone off to. They both have class in the morning. But they’re talking again, and they have the time to spare. 

"Not really." Adam stretches to reach the controls to go back above the mezzanine, to be closer to the rain and stars again.

For the first time in weeks, he feels hopeful.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was listening to Silversun Pickups and made obvious efforts to make that clear when I wrote this chapter. Starting with "Three Seed", "Here We Are (Chancer)", "Creation Lake", and ending with "Circadian Rhythm (Last Dance)". Just in case anyone was curious what Adam was listening to the whole time.


	24. The One When Adam Goes Back to Henrietta

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam isn’t standing with his sculpture in the campus museum. He’s standing next to his car, hundreds of miles away, staring at a light blue trailer with a crooked, rusting 28 mounted to the side of it next to the box window of his childhood bedroom. The paint has completely peeled away from the front steps, leaving them washed out, gray and sun-bleached. There’s a pile of newspapers on the steps, and the mailbox was overflowing down where the drive to the trailer park turned off the main road. His old bike is desiccated and abandoned in the yard with crabgrass and dandelions growing up through the spokes of its flat tires,as if through the ribs of a corpse left to rot in the sun.
> 
> Even knowing no one is inside, he stays put, planted to the parched grass and cracked soil that he came from.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, I'm not dead and CiYH was not on hiatus--I just suck and couldn't get a grip on what this next chapter was supposed to be. I hope it was worth the wait and not completely disappointing.
> 
> EDIT: For some reason only half the chapter posted last night? So I'm rectifying that now, I guess?

Once a year, the week before graduation, the college displays the work of juniors in the fine arts program looking to be considered for senior thesis projects and invites their families to take part in the exhibition. It’s competitive, as space in the campus museum is limited, but the placements in the thesis program aren’t contingent on being displayed so much as the students who are displayed are basically guaranteed spots in the program for their final year.

It’s kind of a big deal. The students with displays are encouraged to dress up and be professional, as the professors and department heads who oversee the thesis program treat the night of the exhibition as a sort of interview, a chance to get the kids to speak about their work in a setting that’s simultaneously more casual than a classroom critique, friendlier than a chat with a TA about your direction, and more rigorous than you’ve been lead to believe the exhibition will be.

Adam isn’t standing with his sculpture in the campus museum. He’s standing next to his car, hundreds of miles away, staring at a light blue trailer with a crooked, rusting 28 mounted to the side of it next to the box window of his childhood bedroom. The paint has completely peeled away from the front steps, leaving them washed out, gray and sun-bleached. There’s a pile of newspapers on the steps, and the mailbox was overflowing down where the drive to the trailer park turned off the main road. His old bike is desiccated and abandoned in the yard with crabgrass and dandelions growing up through the spokes of its flat tires,as if through the ribs of a corpse left to rot in the sun.

Even knowing no one is inside, he stays put, planted to the parched grass and cracked soil that he came from.

It is so quiet. No breeze, no dogs, no kids, no over-loud televisions or right-wing radio stations, no classic rock. It’s as if the trailer park has been abandoned in his absence, familiar and unfamiliar. Apocalyptic. Eerie.

He sighs heavily and moves away from the car, towards the carport. He doesn’t know where the pickup’s spare keys might be, and he doesn’t expect there to be a spare house key stashed somewhere among the abandoned tools -- he’d looked, countless times, throughout the course of his adolescence and never found one -- but he may find something that will get him inside. Robert Parrish’s hulking, oppressive presence so intense here Adam has to check over his shoulder to be sure he’s alone. The Hondayota is the only witness to his hesitation, and Adam shakes himself and starts rummaging through everything to find something to pick the lock with. Everything is where it was left a five weeks ago, many things where Adam remembers them being even after four years away, never intended to have been left to start rusting from exposure and collecting cobwebs.

His father has been dead for a month.

When he’d finally called her back, Judith Meyers had seemed relieved to hear from him. “I’m sorry for your loss, Mr. Parrish. This must be very difficult to hear.”

“Thanks,” he’d said, sounding insincere even to his own ear. He wasn’t sure if it was the right response to give, only that it sounded polite enough to not be entirely wrong. Certainly better than _why are you sorry, you didn’t beat the shit out of me_ or _don’t be, I’m glad he’s dead_. “What happened, exactly?”

“It was a car accident. There were no other cars involved, thank God, but from what I understand your father’s truck was totaled when they went off the road.”

Adam’s first thought was that his father had been drinking. His second was that it was probably a stroke of luck that there was anything left of either of his parents at all, given that the pickup was thirty years old and didn’t have functioning airbags. His third was that he was grateful no one else was involved, and the fourth that the third should have been his first.

Judith Meyers explained the circumstances: Tracy Parrish named Adam her next of kin, and with the death of her husband, Adam became her healthcare proxy. Judith Meyers explained what that meant, what questions she needed Adam to answer, what responsibilities he suddenly had over his mother’s health and well-being.

“That’s all well and good, ma’am,” Adam replied, “But I did everything I could to make sure they couldn’t contact me, for any reason, including anything like this.”

“Sometimes the right person looks at the file and knows how to find someone,” Judith Meyers told him.

Adam was taken to Summersville hospital the night his father deafened him. Someone in billing or legal probably remembered him when Robert and Tracy Parrish turned up in the emergency room and made the connection, filled out their paperwork with Adam’s information and felt like a good Samaritan for doing so. He hopes they choke on their coffee every time between now and their own death.

“I’m very sorry for the inconvenience, then,” her bland, professional reply was subtly judgemental. “If you could just help me tie up some loose ends, Mr. Parrish, I can make a note that you refused to claim them and the state will step in.”

He made an appointment with her tomorrow to do just that, and forced himself to not feel guilty for making her job harder for a month.

As he's about to give up and settle for breaking a window to get inside, Adam spots a bit of scrap metal on a dust-covered toolbox that should be enough to pick the lock with. He pockets it and winces as he steps out of the shade and into the sunlight again. The front steps creak ominously under his weight and the screen door squeals, nearly echoing over the desolate field as he braces it open with his shoulder and sets about forcing the door open.

Somehow it seems ironic that they continued locking the door after he left, since they only seemed to do it when they were trying to make it clear that they didn’t want him around at all.

Where is everyone?

He wishes he was back on campus.

After a long enough while that the sun started burning the skin on the back of his neck and sweat started trickling down his back, after his patience had started to wear thin and he was nearly ready to break the door down instead, the tumblers in the knob pop into place. Adam pockets the scrap metal and plucks at his shirt, exhaling heavily as he steps inside. He leaves the door open because he wants the daylight, not because he’s afraid of trapping himself here with no way to escape. He tries to ignore the apathetic, hysterical part of him that whispers _home sweet home_ as his eyes adjust to the gloom inside.

It should be sad, probably, that like the car port it’s clear by the state of things that his parents had every intention of returning.

Dust and stale cigarette smoke, Tracy Parrish’s cheap and cloying perfume. Robert’s beer and bottom shelf whiskey. Buzzing flies. Blank digital clocks on the stove and cable box, because the power was shut off weeks ago when no one paid the bill.

With no electricity, Adam realizes, he won’t be able to stay here like he’d intended.

There’s something foul in the plastic shopping bag hanging from the corner cabinet, trash long since intended to be taken out, and there are dishes in the sink gone fetid in the stale, hot air inside the trailer. He opens all the windows and blinds before addressing the garbage, because he’ll never be able to get anything done if he doesn’t start trying to put a dent in the smell.

He’ll have to drive back into town and get a room someplace.

The dishes he quickly realizes can’t be washed, since the water has been shut off, too, and he brings the big curbside garbage can inside to dispose of them. Dollar store tupperware containers go unchecked before he tosses them into the can once he stops gagging over the smell of the rotting food in the shut-off fridge.

A room at the bed-and-breakfast would be more than at the motel outside of town, but it’s much closer to the trailer park by almost forty minutes.

The flypaper is where he remembers it being and he hangs a few strips around the kitchen and living room, but what cleaning supplies are under the sink are probably not enough to work with. He can tell by their color his mother watered them down to extend their use, but they’re clearly too diluted to really be worth using.

He’ll have to go buy more.

Adam finds himself standing in the living room, looking around at everything and absorbing none of it. He checks his phone. It’s been an hour and a half since he got here, but it feels like minutes and days simultaneously. The most cynical parts of him are unsurprised that nothing changed, the most pragmatic parts noting what he’ll need to address before he can call a realtor.

If he stays at the b-and-b, he won’t spend as much time driving back and forth. Gas is cheap here, but he doesn’t want to use more than he needs before he drives back to New York in a few days.

Blue texted him almost an hour ago: _wish u were here_ and a string of emojis he's pretty sure are supposed to represent herself, Gansey, Noah, Ronan, Henry Cheng, Maura and Calla. It makes him smile, just a little, that her moms are thinking of him. He replies with a thumbs-up and pockets his phone again.  
  
That so little has changed isn't exactly surprising, but it still has a perplexing fun house effect, distorted and discordant and tilting the world dangerously on its axis. There's the dent in the wall from the time is father missed him and got the paneling instead. There's the stain on the carpet from when Adam was nine and threw up from anxiety over going to school with a broken rib. There’s the countless burn marks from his mother's cigarettes on the couch. There's the chipped bit of counter from the first time his father ever hit him.  
  
In his good ear, he hears the echo of his voice, his child's voice, react to the blow. “ _Wait--!_ "

Every time he thinks he's making progress, he backslides into this: feeling seven and seventeen again, reeling from what happened to him and unable to make sense of it. Trying to understand and failing. Ashamed and ashamed of feeling ashamed. Guilty and not knowing why. Unable to reconcile why he was born if his parents had hated him so much, why he made it to adulthood when they seemed so keen on preventing him from ever reaching it.  
  
Angry. So very angry. Consumingly, completely, hopelessly, violently angry.  
  
Adam is his father's son, through and through, no matter how hard he fights against it.  
  
Every inch of him aches to destroy everything inside the trailer. It trembles in his limbs and makes his ribs burn and his innards clench, and his throat is raw and tight from an unreleased scream. The walls tilt in, menacing and sinister, like trees in a dark forest blocking out the sky and trapping him.  
  
It was always so claustrophobic here.  
  
He sits down on the couch and puts his head between his knees, folding himself small and controlled while he dismantles his fury.  
  
Adam sits there for a long time feeling cheated of something he can't name and doesn't understand. Dr. Poldma tells him he’ll probably never be able to, and he's never fully appreciated how awful that really is before now. He’s genuinely glad his father is dead and his mother is beyond help, and he's not sorry they never had a chance to reconcile, but somehow…  
  
This feels so unfair.  
  
It’s fitting, in a way, because nothing in Adam Parrish’s life has ever been fair. It’s never been easy, or simple, or right--not his conception, not his childhood, not his relationships, his education, his own damn mind, none of it has ever been the way it should be. And still he wants things to be different. He still wants to believe that eventually something will work out in his favor, just once. It’s stupid, really. Naive. He’s throwing a silent, internal tantrum over it like a child.  
  
When Adam was little, he would run through the tall grasses in the wild flats around the trailer park until his legs gave out, and he never seemed to reach the end of the expanse. When he was older, he ran past the tall grass towards the mountains, towards the main road, into town, anyplace he could get to on his feet or on his bike. When he was even older, he ran out past the edge of town, into the arms of any girl who would have him. He took long walks in the woods. He can’t remember if he was trying to find something, or move towards something, or if he was trying to run away. His hands are in his hair, fingers restless on his scalp as he squashes the impulse to pull, to scratch, to protect his head. He stopped running six hundred miles away, and somehow he still ended up back here, in this place, feeling like he never actually left.  
  
“Oh my god.”  
  
Adam nearly jumps out of his skin, his downward spiral screeching to a complete halt that leaves him thoughtless and vacant for several blissfully empty seconds. The mundane sound of crinkling plastic and groceries shuffles him back into his body, and he realizes the person on the other side of the screen door dropped their bags.  
  
“Adam?” the woman says. She recognizes him. Her hand is pressed to her chest as she pulls the screen door open to step inside. She exhales hard, like a laugh. “Holy shit. _Adam_.”  
  
He doesn’t recognize her, and then he does, and even though he knows he knows her, he can’t make his mouth work enough to say anything. Her hair is longer than it was the last time he saw her. Darker, he thinks. Maybe. He can’t remember, but he thinks it used to be more blond. She doesn’t seem any different, otherwise, and time feels meaningless all over again. He’s struck by how straight her shoulders are now.  
  
Brandy puts her hands on her hips, exactly the way he remembers: bony fists to jutting hip bones. “Where the hell have you been?” she demands. She initially seems angry, and then it peters out and her voice gets thick and choked. “My mom called Caltech and MIT and they both told her you never enrolled. She was worried sick. I thought you were dead in a ditch somewhere.”  
  
Adam kind of wishes he was dead in a ditch somewhere right now. Stupidly he says, “I was in New York.”  
  
“Do they not have phones in New York?” Brandy asks, getting fired up again. He’s pretty sure Blue and Ronan have both made the exact same are you fucking kidding me face Brandy’s making right now at him, and he realizes he might have a very definite type. It’s such a stupid, unprompted thought he makes himself laugh, just once. Brandy looks like she’s wondering if he’s gone insane. “Or email? Or fucking Facebook? Or is New York in some alternate universe where it hasn’t been four years since you disappeared off the face of the earth?”  
  
Adam laughs again, even though it’s not funny.  
  
“I’m such an ass,” he says.  
  
“Yeah, you are,” Brandy snaps.  
  
“I’m sorry.”  
  
“You damn well better be.”  
  
He rubs his eyes and leans his elbows on his knees, covering his face with his hands. “My dad died.”  
  
She’s quiet. He looks up at her through his fingers. She looks down and says, “I know.”  
  
“My mom’s in a coma,” he says.  
  
“I know,” Brandy sighs.  
  
“She’s not waking up.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“I’m not sad.”  
  
“I know.”  
  
“Is that wrong? Should I be?”  
  
She purses her lips, and her hands open to rest on her hips less combatively. “Do you think it’s wrong? Do you want to be sad about it?” He shakes his head. “Well, there you go.”  
  
He smiles. Brandy was always very pragmatic that way, and he’s glad that hasn’t changed. He’s glad he’s not alone. She glances at her bags on the steps, at him, at the couch, back at the bags, and joins him on the couch.  
  
“So,” she says, “New York, huh?”  
  
“Yeah,” he says, “New York.”


	25. The One With the Hospital

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> At twenty-two, Adam has spent more time than he’d like to admit in hospitals and urgent care centers and free clinics. He has not, however, ever been directed to the not-medical part of such a place before, as he had been this morning. It still smells like antiseptic and there are people in long white coats, but the walls are wood paneled and no one’s wearing scrubs. It feels very much like if he looks down the hallway just so, he’d see a TV camera at the end of it instead of the shiny doors of the elevator that brought him here.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey, hi! I'm not dead! This isn't abandoned! I'm just, uhhhhhh, The Worst.

“What do you know about countertops?”

“Uh. Not as convenient for sex as porn would have you believe.”

“No, I know–what? _Noah._ ”

Noah doesn’t sound particularly apologetic. “I know with relative certainty that we both know it’s true.”

Adam pinches the bridge of his nose. This hardware store smells like concrete and dust, and he can’t hear anything with the phone to his ear, but it had been just less than disorientingly loud when he came in. He’s already had to dodge no less than three people in store aprons who wanted to help him. He accidentally catches the eye of an employee who starts to approach him, prompting Adam to turn away and wander further down an aisle of cabinet door finishes and tile countertop options. 

“Is Ronan there?” Adam asks.

“He’s out with Gansey. Groceries, I think? Gansey wanted orange juice, we ran out yesterday.” He can’t tell if the tone in Noah’s voice is exhaustion from grading finals, stoned boredom, a depressive episode, or some combination of the three. 

“Are you okay?”

“I’m here,” Noah says cryptically. “I’m alive. I exist because I bleed.” 

Adam’s patience for this entire endeavor is wearing thin, and Noah’s Byronic melancholy is trying even with a full tank of patience. Adam is running on fumes. “Can you have Ronan call me when he gets back?” 

Noah exhales in a way that definitely involves smoke of some kind. “Why Ronan?”

Adam gestures vaguely at the small, fake kitchen he’s standing in front of even though Noah can’t see him. “He does this home improvement shit. I’m assuming he can help me figure out what I’m doing.”

“You know what they say about assuming,” Noah mumbles. More clearly he says, “You know, as a homeowner myself, I’m not completely useless with this stuff, either.”

“You rent,” Adam reminds him, “A bedroom in an apartment that you’re not on the lease of.”

“I am an _adult_.” Noah sounds significantly more lucid in his offense. “I have a mortgage.” 

“You absolutely don’t.”

“If you’re gonna be like that, I’m never inviting you to Passover.”

“At your imaginary house?“

“You’re an ass. I’ll tell Ronan to call you.”

“Thanks.” Noah hangs up before Adam can say anything else, but it’s not clear if he was actually annoyed or just sick of talking. Adam tucks his phone back into his pocket and laces his fingers behind his head as he looks up at an appallingly ugly mosaic that fits roughly in the budget he set out for himself for this endeavor.

Objectively, Adam knew the trailer was worthless, but he also knew that despite their constant griping over how expensive it was to maintain, his parents had allowed it to fall into a state of disrepair that would make selling it as-is pointless. At the very least, he needs to make some cosmetic updates to at least get some money out of it to pay for whatever the hospital or state might require for them. 

“Any luck with your friend?” Brandy asks, suddenly at Adam’s side with their cart. He hadn’t heard her, and his heart stops briefly. Thankfully he doesn’t seem to have jumped too badly, because she doesn’t seem especially moved by startling him. “Sorry, I forgot about your,” she gestures at her left ear.

“It’s fine,” he says, as evenly as he can with his heart still light and frantic under his ribs. “He wasn’t home. His roommate’s going to have him call me back when he gets home.”

Brandy raises her eyebrow. “No phone?”

“No taste for them.”

“What a freak,” she says. She gestures to the cart. “Well, I found all that painting and spackle stuff, and a new doorknob for the front door. The dude at the paint counter said getting the panels off the walls is real hard, so you should paint over them or cover them up with, like, drywall or some shit.”

Adam sighs. More paint it is, then. She pokes his exposed skin and he drops his arms, stepping away from her. “What was that for?”

“Stop showing that off,” she says, picking at the hem of his shirt. “It’s asking for it.”

 

“It is not.”

She pokes him again. This time, it almost tickles. “It is. You grew up good, we get it.”

He frowns and swats her hand away. Adam’s not sure if it’s just because they don’t quite remember how to talk to each other any other way anymore, or if he’s just looking for whatever scraps of her old affections he can find, but she’s definitely made a few passes at him since the initial reunion awkwardness and catching up passed. He can’t tell how serious she is, and the uncertainty is making it hard to completely brush her off.

The part of him that’s perpetually salivating at the mere idea of being wanted and touched is nearly frothing at the mouth just being around Brandy again, and the part of him that aches to be young and stupid is begging for the chance to get what it wants, but the rest of him, like it always does, is winning.

“What should we do while we’re waiting for your friend?”

Adam gives the ugly mosaic he’s probably going to get stuck buying one last look before taking control of the paint-laden shopping cart. “New screens?”

“We didn’t measure any of the windows before we left,” Brandy reminds him. “Or the front door.”

“Floors?”

“Same problem.”

He sighs and hangs his head. “What else is there?”

Brandy counts off on her fingers. “Appliances, electricity, bathroom, lumber?”

“Lumber,” Adam says. It feels good to have something as straightforward as wood and nails to contend with. “The front steps. Some of the wood needs replacing.”

“At least wood and paint is easy,” Brandy says as they head towards the far side of the store. She keeps one hand on the cart as Adam pushes it, like she doesn’t want to be separated from him despite the store being fairly empty in the middle of the afternoon on a weekday. “I vote the wood’s the last thing we worry about today. I’m starving and we still need to get cleaning stuff and drop all this shit off before dark.”

Adam stops suddenly, causing Brandy to trip and glare at him. He doesn’t have anywhere to stay. “I completely forgot to check in anywhere. Damn.”

Brandy purses her lips. “You could stay with me.” At his frown she says, “At my mom’s. She’ll be happy to see you.”

His frown deepens. Darlene Corwin lived her entire life convinced Adam was put on this planet to knock up her daughter and leave her behind for whatever fancy college he managed to get into, and he somehow doubts that’s changed, no matter how worried she’d been when he left Henrietta so suddenly. 

“You’ll both survive one night.” Brandy puts her hands on her hips. “Come on, Adam, you can clutch your pearls about it and squat for the night at your folks’ or you can stay with us. Don’t make it weird.”

“I’m staying on the couch,” he says, starting to push the cart again. Brandy doesn’t move to follow him right away and he knows she’s probably rolling her eyes or praying or both. 

\---

The first time Adam was in a hospital, he was four and had broken one of his fingers. A sudden, violent breeze before a thunderstorm whipped the screen door shut on his hand, and while he no longer remembers the pain, he remembers the shock of it; the wrongness of not being able to move his finger, the realization that it was bent in a way nature did not intend for it to. He remembers crying. He remembers his mother taking him by the shoulders and telling him to shut up and calm down and tell her what happened, and he remembers his father swearing at the door for not staying open like it was supposed to. He remembers his mother hugging him in the brusque, businesslike way she always had, and he remembers his father buckling the seatbelt for him in the passenger seat of the pickup. 

Adam can recall, with near perfect clarity, one of Robert Parrish’s big hands covering the whole top of Adam’s head, the way his father had always managed to turn an almost fond, almost paternal ruffle of his son’s hair into a demand for attention.

 _Adam_ , his father said, _Don’t you start yelling while your mama’s driving, you hear? It makes her nervous._

 _Oh, Bob_ , his mother said as she climbed into the driver’s seat. _It’s you saying dumb shit like that that makes me nervous._

The last time Adam was in a hospital, he was nineteen and Ronan had tried to kill himself. Adam had been at work and didn’t get any of the frantic, hysterical phone calls from Gansey and Blue until hours later. He can recall precisely the swimming, detached anxiety and suffocating guilt over not knowing what he’d missed. Clinically, he could feel himself sliding through the grieving process in the car, because the hours of radio silence since the last missed call had him convinced he was moments away from finding out one of his best friends had died. I’m one of those people with a dead friend now, he thought in the hospital parking lot.

At twenty-two, Adam has spent more time than he’d like to admit in hospitals and urgent care centers and free clinics. He has not, however, ever been directed to the not-medical part of such a place before, as he had been this morning. It still smells like antiseptic and there are people in long white coats, but the walls are wood paneled and no one’s wearing scrubs. It feels very much like if he looks down the hallway just so, he’d see a TV camera at the end of it instead of the shiny doors of the elevator that brought him here.

He hadn’t been sure what the situation called for, in terms of appropriate dress--what are you supposed to wear when you’re signing away legal obligations?--so he’d gone with his Gansey-sounding instinct to bring his suit to be safe. So, really, his reflection just looks like he’s here for a job interview. Brandy made fun of him. Her mother, who mellowed with age about as well as curdled milk, demanded he stop hogging the bathroom. Her stepfather offered him the master bedroom to finish getting ready in.

It would be really great of his palms would stop sweating.

He’d asked the people at the front desk for Tracy Parrish’s room number, but he didn’t visit it before he came up here. He hadn’t wanted to see her, and then he asked despite himself, and is kind of wishing he had because he’s not sure if he’ll still be an approved visitor after this meeting. He knows he won’t be seeing his father, who was cremated and given an indigent burial in a county cemetery when it had seemed that Adam’s contact information wasn’t accurate. 

“Mr. Parrish?”

It’s what Robert Parrish deserved, but it doesn’t feel right somehow.

Adam stands to greet the tall, round woman approaching him and shakes her hand when she offers it to her, despite his still clammy palms. Judith Meyers is much, much different than what he’d expected, but she seems pleasant enough as she makes polite small talk with him as he follows her down the hall to her office, which is decorated with a puzzling amount of pig-themed knick-knacks and has a view of the hospital’s decidedly ugly parking lot. Adam’s car doesn’t stand out as badly as he’d feared it would, at least not at such a distance, and it’s somehow comforting.

As soon as they’re both adequately settled, Adam says, bluntly and without prompting, “I’d like to forfeit whatever it is my mother burdened me with. I didn’t want to be in this position in the first place, and I don’t know why she appointed me her proxy.”

“I recall you saying that, yes,” Judith says. She purses her lips, and her voice is as subtly disapproving as Adam recalls it being over the phone. “Mr. Parrish. Adam. May I call you Adam?” She does not wait for him to give her permission. “You must understand that there’s a certain way of doing these things, and I’m sorry you have a strained relationship with your parents--”

Adam’s fists clench, more reflexively than angrily, and he forces them to open and relax again. “It was abusive and toxic, actually. I can only imagine my mother named me her proxy as some kind of final insult. I want to fill out a resignation of agent form and let the state do whatever it wants to with her.” 

She has the decency to flush with either misplaced shame or embarrassment and looks away from him. “There’s still the issue of the cost …”

What happens next is painfully slow-moving and still a blur. Adam watches himself sign the resignation form. He watches Judith Meyers tap away at her computer as she updates his mother’s records, and as she files the form away to be notarized by the end of the week. 

“You’ll still have visitation rights during public hours,” she tells him, but it’s with an air of exhaustion that tells him she’s marginally relieved to finally see this whole business drawing to a close, even if it’s not as tidy a one as she’d hoped. She jots down an address on a sticky note and hands it to him. “If you want to visit your father’s grave, and your mother’s, once she’s finally passed on.”

Adam leaves her office as soon as he’s able to. 

Without really realizing what he’s doing, he finds himself conveniently mislocated in one of the hospital’s intensive care units instead of in the lobby. He sidesteps a nurse so engrossed in her clipboard she nearly collides with him, and despite not being fully aware of how he got here, he knows why he’s here.

Room 213 is quiet save for the hiss of ventilators and the pinging of heart monitors, the whirring of other machines doing other vital things for the people they’re attached to. The three other occupants are much older than Adam’s mother, but she looks so different than what he remembers he almost doesn’t recognize her. Without her glasses on and her hair done, she looks both older and younger, thin and sallow against the sheets. A marionette without her strings, a prop designed to haunt rather than scare and so unnervingly still Adam feels threatened that she’ll suddenly move or look right at him. 

She does not move, and neither does her son. She doesn’t look at Adam because she can’t open her own eyes, and Adam looks at her because he can’t convince himself not to. Robert is dead and buried hasn’t rid Adam of his ghost, but he hadn’t really understood just how much Tracy has been haunting him, too. 

The hospital smell is starting to make him dizzy. 

A nurse comes into the room, as startled by Adam standing there as he is of her entering, and before she can finish apologizing for surprising him, he’s excusing himself and leaving for the safety and privacy of his car.

Back in the Hondayota’s driver’s seat, Adam wrenches the knot of his tie loose and leans his head against the top of the steering wheel. Deep breaths of the balmy West Virginia summer sit damply in his lungs. The burn of the steering wheel’s hot plastic against his palms and forearms is the only thing keeping his hands from shaking. He tightens his grip on the wheel until the backs of his hands and his knuckles hurt. 

His phone rings. He ignores it. It continues to ring. He continues to ignore it. It stops ringing. He exhales, jagged and relieved. It rings again.

It’s just that West-- Adam rubs his forehead against the back of his hand. No, it’s not the West Virginia number anymore. It wouldn’t be after this morning. He digs into his pocket, neglects to read the caller ID, and answers. 

“Adam?” Dr. Poldma says. Adam pulls the phone away from his ear to confirm that it is, in fact, Dr. Poldma on the other end of the call. “Are you there?”

Adam pinches the bridge of his nose. “Sorry. Yeah, I’m here.”

Dr. Poldma is quiet. “Is everything alright?”

“I have to cancel for Friday,” he says. The words come out like they’re pre-recorded, because he feels nothing as he says them. If he didn’t hear the muffled sound of his own voice inside his head, he wouldn’t even know he was speaking and not just opening his mouth for his voice to escape. “Sorry for the short notice.”

“That’s fine, I expected as much, considering. Are you alright?”

“No.” It feels strangely good to admit it, better than when he confessed to Ronan that he didn’t want to come back here at all. Still feeling stilted and robotic and not quite moored to his body or his life, Adam tells Dr. Poldma everything. Dr. Poldma is quiet, as she often is, as Adam tries to summon up some of the emotions he keeps stuffed in neat and tidy boxes in his mind, knowing that talking to her means he’s supposed to unpack them and try to lay them out in neat, tidy rows to be examined and picked through before being stored away again. Adam takes a deep breath through his nose and holds it for just long enough to feel the need to cough before releasing it. “I didn’t think I would be upset. I thought I was done being angry about this. About them. But I am. I’m angry. And I’m sad, but I don’t feel like I should be. Is that weird? Is it wrong?” 

Dr. Poldma makes a sound like she’s sucking on her teeth, and it’s very unpleasant over the phone. Adam grimaces. “It’s not about what’s right or what’s wrong to me or anyone else, Adam. It’s about what’s right for you. Was signing that paperwork today right for you?”

“Yeah.”

“Is selling their things and getting rid of their house right for you?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Do you think someday you’ll regret the choices you’ll make this week?”

Neither of them says anything for a long time, and Adam begins to examine a scratch on the plastic of his steering wheel. “I don’t know, but I guess I have to find out.” 

“That’s all you can ever hope for.”

They lapse into a long silence as Adam watches people come and go to and from cars around him and eventually rolls down his window to have a cigarette. In her office at Aglionby, Dr. Poldma is probably doing end of year paperwork, or whatever else it is non-academic counselors do during the day. 

“I didn’t want to tell you this over the phone,” she says, eventually. Her already tiny voice is impossibly smaller, and he has to close the window to hear her properly. 

Adam closes his eyes and tips his head back against the headrest. His tie suddenly feels very tight, but he forces himself to loosen the knot carefully and slowly. “This is the last time, then?”

“I was going to tell you on Friday. I’m not going anywhere, Adam.”

He swallows around the knot of not being able to afford seeing her at her private practice without using his school insurance, at the idea of having to open up to a stranger. “Doctor--”

“Persephone,” she says. “I’m not your doctor anymore.”

“Persephone,” he amends. “Do you recommend I see anyone else in particular? On campus?”

She hums. There’s a strange shuffling sound on her end of the call that makes Adam pull the phone away from his ear slightly. “Why would I do a thing like that?”

Adam frowns. “I--my insurance is from the school, I have to see someone there.”

The shuffling sound happens again. “Oh, yes. Well. If you insist, but I actually had something else in mind. How do you feel about psychics?”

**Author's Note:**

> HMU on [my Tumblr](http://300foxholeway.tumblr.com) for more shenanigans and general fannish whinging, and check out my CiYH tags while you're there! Check out [the official Tumblr](http://color-in-your-hands.tumblr.com) for even more content--I always have my inboxes open for questions, comments, and the like!
> 
> [The official soundtrack](https://open.spotify.com/user/anonymouscatastrophe/playlist/1EZw9tEHHCJeeIanpd4cFH) for CiYH will periodically be updated as the story progresses and is available publicly on Spotify for those of you who are interested in hearing the songs that inspire and fuel each individual chapter.


End file.
